Category: Media

• Shift Lock #1: Terms of engagement

  April 3, 2023

  After ‘abandoning’ the blog part of this site in early 2022, I embarked on a foolish newsletter endeavour called Shift Lock_. It was fun and/or sustainable for a handful of posts, but then life got in the way. Over the next little while I’ll re-post those ruminations here for posterity._ Errors and omissions my own. This instalment was published March 18, 2022 (see all Shift Lock posts here).

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  Shift Lock #1: Terms of engagement

  

  Photo by Conny Schneider on Unsplash.

  Sometimes it’s good to go back to first principles.

  A course I’m teaching this semester has a number of non-media students as part of its cohort. As a result, I found myself having to establish a number of core ideas from media studies that I hadn’t really thought about for quite some years.

  We talk a lot in our typically siloed university about ‘disciplinary knowledge’, the sort of thing that is often taken for granted that teachers or students of a particular area will possess.

  I was thinking about how to start this little project; what best to wax lyrical about as a way in to some of the deeper theoretical/philosophical questions that might lie underneath whatever it may turn out to be. This idea of disciplinary knowledge let me to think that horrible existential question: do I have any? What have I retained? What are some of the buzzwords that I use all the time without really questioning or thinking too hard about them?

  One such phrase is media landscape. Given that it’s what I tell everyone I’m interested in, I should know what I mean by it, right? Or at least, have some take on it specific to my work?

  Landscape evokes mental imagery of distant horizons, hazy hills, some broken-down ruin in the foreground. Invisible brushstrokes; fantasy rendered real. When I think media landscape, the first flash is of a wireframe model; something from Tron or Lawnmower Man.

  Leaving questions of real/virtual and metaverses to one side for now, though (soon, don’t worry), a wire meshwork is actually closest to how I think about the media landscape. It is an effective model, given that media — broadly defined, at least for me — is a set of relations between texts, artefacts, messages, products; platforms, forms (genres?) and formats; producers, creators; tools and technicians; institutions; and audiences (semi-colonic separation very intentional, if only to bracket out potential future articles/chapters/Shift Lock posts).

  Leaning into this metaphor, then, the meshwork, the lines, the connections, would represent relationships, behaviours, transmissions, shared characteristics between all of these elements.

  In attempting to understand how meaning is formed in non-human minds, Tim Ingold examines James Gibson’s ecological, affordance-based, approach to perception, alongside the work of Jakob von Uexküll, who sits arbitrarily opposite Gibson. I shan’t go into affordance, Umwelt, and so on here, suffice to say that Gibson argues that properties of tools/resources — such as a stone in Ingold’s example — are available to be “taken up”, where von Uexküll offers that “they are qualities that are bestowed upon the stone by the need of the creature in question and in the very act of attending to it.”1 This singular vision of an organism to its resource means that no other possible use or perspective is possible to that organism; it is trapped in its own Umwelt, “its own particular ‘bubble’ of reality.”2

  Such a uni-directional model (organism > object) would render all objects “neutral” in von Uexküll’s view. To this, Ingold rebuts:

  No animal, however, or at least no non-human animal, is in a position to observe the environment from such a standpoint of neutrality. To live, it must already be immersed in its surroundings and committed to the relationships this entails. And in these relationships, the neutrality of objects is inevitably compromised.3

  You may well be thinking, “Well, this is certainly a tangent.” Consider the media landscape, though, as an environment in Ingold’s sense. In many ways, we are caught up in our own little _Umwelt_s, our little cycles of use (or self-abuse), our routines of creation or consumption. These bubbles (theory throwback, anyone?) establish relations and modes of behaviour between humans and the tools (services, platforms, apps, sites, companies…) we engage. They are as porous as we need them to be; some are siloed, others open and truly en_mesh_ed.

  

  Screenshot from “The Internet map”, taken 18 March 2022.

  So when I close my eyes and think ‘media landscape’, I think some combination of procedurally-generated wireframe world, and also The Internet map, a ‘photo’ that data scientist Ruslan Enikeev took of the internet at the end of 2011. Part of this current project is to map — conceptually, not empirically — this landscape, updating it somewhat to consider innovations in (and impacts of) algorithms, new creative technologies, and recent research in fields like psychology, social science, and ethnography.

  Another part, though, is to head back to those first principles: to audience, institution, to text… and to re-evaluate these in light of the foregoing. Anyway, if that sounds like a fun time, hang about!

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  Below the Divider

  At the end of each post I’ll try to link a few sites, posts, articles, videos that have piqued my interest of late. Some will be connected to my research, some to teaching and other parts of academia, still others will be… significantly less so (let’s keep some fun going, shall we?).

  • ‘Web3: A Map in Search of Territory’, by Evgeny Morozov, at The Crypto Syllabus.
  • ‘Flipped learning: Extinct or endemic?’, by Robert Talbot, on his blog.
  • ‘Is the Internet Dead? – Dead Internet Theory Explained’, from Chill Fuel on YouTube.

  1

  Ingold, Tim, ‘Point, Line, Counterpoint: From Environment to Fluid Space’, in Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London: Routledge, pp. 76-88, p. 79.

  2

  Ingold, p. 80.

  3

  Ingold, p. 80.

• Pomodoro ramblings

  July 23, 2016

  In my first classes this week, I introduced first-year students to the Pomodoro technique. I’ve had a mixed relationship with the technique, but sometimes find it useful in terms of getting my head fully into a project during its opening stages. In solidarity, I too typed non-stop for 15 minutes (a reduced pomodoro — usually they run for 25). The results were… well, they were a glimpse into the chaos of my brain. I’ve edited them slightly (ditched typos and some of the more bizarre tangents), added links and some editorial notes, and re-posted here. The unit is a foundational media subject, and is a blend of theory and practice.

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  Prompt: What would you like to get out of the class?

  I would like to hone my pedagogy — in particular getting students engaged during workshop and lecture time. I am actively working to fill the lecture time not only with content, clips, and relevant examples, but also with activities that break the monotonous delivery.

  I have already run out of ideas but I’m going to keep typing because this is what the Pomodoro technique is all about. Look if I’m honest I think the introduction of the Pomodoro technique into the classroom situation is an interesting thing for me and the students. It gets them thinking about writing as a practice and as a discipline, not this far-off thing that’s unobtainable and difficult. The Pomodoro technique is all about quantity rather than quality — which explains quite a bit about this piece I’m writing at the moment. (more…)

• My theory of cinema

  March 2, 2015

  

  I’m in the midst of writing a paper for inclusion in a semiotics journal that will eventually, I suppose, become my theory of cinema. The thing is, I could probably just cobble something together from Deleuze and wrap it around a conception of mobility and collaborative cultures. The more I think about it, though, the more intrigued I’m getting about just what my conception of cinema is. ‘Cinema’ doesn’t mean the same thing now as it did fifty years ago. Nor twenty, or even ten years ago. It’s coming to mean the original ‘niche’ understanding of the broad swathe of films that aren’t made, necessarily, for commercial gain. In this sense, ‘cinema’ means a body of filmed work that speaks to something larger than the typical art/commerce spectrum. The definition of what that larger something is, thus, becomes the crux of this paper I’m working on. My issue, though, is that I don’t think movies-for-the-masses should necessarily be excluded from the category of ‘cinema’. I guess I’ll have to work in some social angle, and I guess the mobility and consumer-creation stuff is the bridge there. Anyway – expect more disjointed rantings on the subject as I work through this.

• Death to the selfie stick

  February 16, 2015

  

  Today I had the pleasure of attending the RMIT nonfictionLab‘s symposium on interactive documentary. A great many interesting talks were given, and I’m hoping to collate some of my notes into coherent ramblings here and elsewhere over the coming days.

  I was reading various tweets today, watching some of the presentations at the conference, and ruminating more generally on photography, mobile media and the ‘self’. As something of a disclaimer, I abhor selfie sticks. I find their presence and purpose incomprehensible, and the people who use them (for the most part) arrogant and, possibly appropriately, self-absorbed.

  In spite of this, my mind kept returning to them today, in light of some of the discussion around ‘autodocumentary’. In using our smart devices to track and photograph and record and measure every movement we make, we are, in a sense, creating a narrative; a documentary of our lives.

  The ‘selfie stick’, ostensibly, aids in the act of taking ‘selfies’, or photographs of the photographer. The ‘selfie’ finds its origins in the ‘fridge shot’: an often poorly-composed, over-exposed photograph of the photographer and one or several other people. I find this origin important, given that the current ‘selfie’ is a refined and technologically-improved (allegedly) version of the earlier iteration.

  What struck me today is that the ‘selfie stick’, by its nature, is a step in a weird direction. Physically, the device distances the camera from the ‘self’, allowing a modicum of control over the composition and quality of the resulting artefact. I think it could be argued, then, that the selfie stick does not create ‘selfies’ as we have come to know them. A photograph taken with the aid of a selfie stick is more akin to one taken with the aid of a tripod, in that the photographer takes much more care with the composition and preparation of the shot.

  ‘Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention,’ writes Susan Sontag in her magnificent On Photography (1977), ‘[though] the act of photographing is more than passive observing.’

  Sontag is relaying here that while photography necessarily detaches any interaction or meddling with the subject (if recording something as it appears in nature or, for want of any other word ‘reality’), it cannot be seen as just that: recording. In the framing up of any given subject, you lose any claim to objectivity.

  I would argue that in holding the camera at arm’s length, with no idea of what the frame is, or what the light is like, or whether you and your mates are even in the damn picture, the ‘fridge shot’ and, to an extent, the original smartphone selfie (before front-facing cameras, introduced to Apple devices with 2010’s iPhone 4 – yep, only five years ago), are more in line with the former definition. This is mainly due to the fact that the artist’s control over the artefact is limited, both physically and in terms of the relinquishing of some of the act to the technology itself.

  The ‘distancing’ that comes into play with the selfie stick is an attempt to control the entirety of the act of taking selfies which, in some small way, detracts from the entire philosophy and purpose of the selfie.

  Yet another, this time thoroughly thought-out, reason to detest the selfie stick.

• Editing

  October 31, 2014

  Rough cut.

  Draft cut.

  Polish.

  Proof render.

  Final cut.

  *crack beer*

  …

  Changes arrive.

  Final cut V2.

  Final cut V3.

  Export for web.