This weeks reading for Integrated Media was an excerpt from Sam Hinton and Larissa Hjorth’s book: Understanding Contemporary Culture Series : Understanding Social Media. The following are some of the interesting points/random notes generated from the reading.

• Social Network Sites = SNS for short (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr etc)
• Social media has blurred the line between what is public and what is private.
• Our social activities online can be correlated and brought together to form a social profile which can in turn be sold to advertisers.
• Social media can be credited for the rise in participatory culture and engagement, where users become produces of content.
• Uses of SNS are unaware that their ‘unpaid work’ is being exploited for the benefits of corporations.
• Social media is both empowering and controlling at the same time.
• The way a person behaves online on SNS can be greatly influenced by their offline lives.
• “Friendship and intimacy can be both amplified and commodified through social media”

WEB 2.0

• Web 2.0 relates to how the internet developed as a result of how people used it. Web 2.0 is basically user-focused business models which were created and used as strategies to align with how people were using the internet.
• There is not just one internet. There are multiple. The different internets across the world are used in a variety of different ways.
• The web evolved much later after the internet was invented. The web became known to us as the ‘online’. Where the internet once was a series of computers connected to each other, sharing information, the web emerged as ‘an interface that allowed people to discover and access internet resources quickly and easily’.
• We use the web when we interact with each other online – e.g. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) application.
• When we type in a website address, we are accessing a server on a computer connected to the internet (a host). Some sites require several computers and servers to handle the traffic.
• We use a web browser to send information to the server on what we are trying to access, and the server sends this information back to the browser so that we may access it. This two way interaction is vital to how the web works hence why participation on the internet is so important.
• Hypertext: linking online texts to other texts, creating a complex series of relationships hence the name web.
• The web allowed computers connected to the internet to share photos, videos and text which in turn created a multimedia interface.
• “…the web’s ability to bring together multiple digital media sources through a single easy-to-use interface was a significant innovation in the development of the internet.

COMMERCIALISING THE WEB

• “…media was no longer delivered in a sealed package to audiences but that audiences played a participatory role in its creation.”
• There are two terms: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The term Web 1.0 only emerged after Web 2.0 was created, for at the time of Web 1.0, people did not know that they were infact in that era. The numbers of 1.0 and 2.0 mirror the numbering of software, and so insinuates that Web 1.0 is a less evolved and inferior version than Web 2.0.
• The internet, as it emerged, was capable of providing highly detailed information about audiences. Where there are people, there are markets.
• Earlier on, internet users were unwilling to pay for information and online services. So making money from the internet was a problematic issue. Web 1.0 was the product of trying to make money from internet users.

Wow this reading was not a nice one. “The affordances of networked connectivity offer the potential to re-contextualise documentary material through mobilising the enormous co-creative potential of human discourse captured in the web. The challenge in these marriages of mass media form and rhizomatic network is to find new ways of shaping attention into a coherent experience. To do so we have to re-invent the social praxis of documentary, creating new visual and informational grammars.” Struggled to get through that one and it was one of the opening paragraphs.

Pretty much the reading went on to talk about how data is changing and how, simultaneously, our way of receiving and interpreting this data is also growing. The reading also went on to explain how documentary film has influenced changing the world, as opposed to simply just observing and recording it. I think this is an interesting point and one which relates to our other subject, True Lies: Documentaries. Representation is the key to communication.

So what does this mean when we look at the online models of documentation? As the web coding language HTML5 is becoming more of an integrated web technology as opposed to a simple add on, new connections can be made between source.

The discussion of the interface used in online documentary We Feel Fine was really a fascinating one. It essentially related to patterns on several different blogs which mentioned the same choice phrases or words. Each user has a unique experience when interacting with this documentary. It drew upon samples from the blogsphere and created something beautiful from it.

Luers, Will. “Plotting the Database.” Database | Narrative | Archive: Seven Interactive Essays on Digital Nonlinear Storytelling. Ed. Matt Soar and Monika Gagnon. N. p., 2013. Web.

• Database narratives: narratives where there is essentially no plot, no character development, no clear development of story etc mainly due to a “computer’s networked and modular environment”. Whilst it seems like there is no clear narrative construction within a database narrative, there are some elements of it.
• According to Jerome McGann: A database requires a user interface to function. A database is organised and provides an initial “critical analysis of the content materials”. This doesn’t necessarily mean it is a narrative.
• With a plot, it is generally within one space and time and continues on to make sense and link together. Significant turning points create their own interface where a viewer may understand what has happened, what is happening and what might happen.
• An example given is one of the database of the information related to a particular scene by Sergei Eisenstein in Alexander Nevsky’s film. The different elements of the scene are laid out so that we may see how they relate to one another: how the visual links to the music which links to the movement etc. This is a database, and it allows the viewer to quickly gather an interpret information.
• If an interface is unable to quickly and effectively receive or gather information then it is essentially not a well designed one.
• An interface changes by the direction in which the user chooses to take it.
• A plotted interface “withholds as much as it reveals” i.e. relays certain information by not including certain parts.
• An entry point is a portal from the interface to the database. The entry point should prep the user for interaction.
• Macro level: what we see at face value. Micro level: deeper meaning and understanding.
• The Whale Hunt is Jonathan Harris’ interactive photo essay. Macro level: a sea of colour made from the photos contained within the photo essay. Macro level: an understanding and emotional connection as the whale hunt unfolds.
• You may click on whichever photo you want throughout the interactive photo essay (as allowed by the interface), making it a non-linear narrative.
• Missing Data –> absence = presence. This is a writing technique which I remember being taught in school. Less is more; what you leave out can sometimes be more effective than what you choose to include.
• When we absorb a story, it will depend on our previous experiences and what we bring to our understanding of the narrative. There is a network in our minds over what information is being received and what we are adding in and decoding ourselves.
• “Empty space or “white space,” a graphic device that gives visual structure to “content,” might also be used as a narrative device to structure meaningful absences.”
• If data is excluded its importance is questioned.
• In “Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry” there is a very ambiguous opening, which doesn’t really give much information away about how the two people who owned the items in the catalogue broke up. In presenting viewers with this phase which is open to interpretation, it then allows the viewer to interpret the pictures openly. They are unsure what to look for and so, look for any clue that they can. Each page presents a new interface presenting the photos and information differently each time.
• The various different interfaces used in media force the viewers attention to follow certain lines of inquiries and focus i.e. big bold titles, colourful pictures etc.
• When there are multiple images on a page, it becomes a spacial montage where the screen is the interface. Our ability to utilise our distributed attention allows us to make meaning from the pictures and find links between them.
• depending on the interface, the multiple pictures on a screen can either compete for attention, disrupt the plot, create a simultaneous narrative or result in confusion/misdirection due to information not having any relation at all.
• An interface also uses graphic devices to help navigation i.e. hyperlinks, titles subtitles etc. An example is Facebook, where there is a clear banner at the top, and links to other pages in blue and white (or a change in the cursor symbol). These graphical devices are not content, they are just an aid.
• Relational events: “An interface is perhaps more engaging when displaying subjective time through spatial relationships. For example, a small frame embedded within a larger frame can spatially denote a “flashback.” Grids, timelines and nested narratives (mise en abyme) act both as framing device – for how to read one narrative in light of others – but also as a way to graphically model the nonlinearity and recursion in thought and experience.”