Creative Essay: Part 5

References

 Assmann, J. (2011). Communicative and Cultural Memory.

Erill, A. (2008). Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction. International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, p. 1-7.

Watts, Duncan J. (2003) Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/aug/03/internet.email

Creative Essay: Part 4

Conclusion

As future media creators, critics, and hopefully industry personal, we must be aware of the constant changes happening within the field. These days it seems that in order to succeed one must be ahead of the grade, persistently thinking about what society might want, or need in terms of media outlets in the near future. The Internet seems to be slowly unraveling the conservative side of society, and the public are both accepting, and seeking more radical, untypical streams of content (eg. Vice). Now that we do have access to ideals and influence from worlds we may never physically see, its up to us to utilize all information possible to hypothesize on what society will seek out from it’s media personal in the near future, and be at the forefront of delivering it.

Creative Essay: Part 3

The Internet has not only opened up global streams of communication, but has, and will continue to not only influence certain cultures, but through our participation, will assist future generations in archiving the past more accurately than the human race has ever been able to, to date.

For much of our recorded history, humans have progressed society in many forms through cultural appropriation. It is only alongside the rapid rise of the Internet however that this concept has received its ubiquitous term, and in turn become a far more self-conscious notion. Whereas something like music, was once heavily confined stylistically to the region in which it was conceived (Kentucky blue-grass, Ethiopian afro-beat, Southern blues), the Internet has globalized the stream of inspiration, and artists are now able to more liberally indulge in all the music that they could possibly want to find, no matter how far away they find themselves, in terms of both time period and geographical location.

One of the most interesting examples of this cultural clash/unification/blending we are seeing today is the currently trendy fad, ‘PC Music’, a genre so reliant on computers and the Internet it has taken its name directly from it. Disregarding the fact that PC music is mostly comprised sonically of electronic elements, it is a genre that would have never been conceived without computers, and particularly the Internet. The genre as a whole describes its many influences as stemming from places scattered all over the globe; Euro-pop, J-pop, K-pop (all of which are cultural genre mashes themselves), 1990s American pop, and R&B are all prominent in any list you can find online, and it usually doesn’t even stop there.

Seeing as I hope to one-day work in the field of music media production, I find it to be an extremely interesting industry to explore in relation to the Internet. Whilst the web may have paved the way for new, obscure mashing’s of traditional styles, on the other hand, the Internet can work in the opposite way, prolonging, or even bringing back old structures and formats, such as cassette tapes, which have recently heightened their popularity online. Maurice Halbwachs made the great discovery that “human memory depends, like consciousness in general, on socialisation and communication”. Today’s cassette culture is both a reaction to and a product of digital media, and ultimately, the Internet. Tapes are the embrace of something old and out-dated, intentionally obscure and marginal, almost pointless in some way, however, the Internet is a place where cassettes are allowed to flourish.

In Jan Assmann’s piece, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, he discusses the “participation of groups within cultural memory” and their ability to “preserve the past”, focusing heavily on key ways in which certain groups have historically kept track of religion. He talks of “poets, and storytellers” being some of the earliest forms of building and defining cultural memory, as it was their task to take what they had seen, and spread the word, allowing others to gain insight as well. This theory ultimately sounds like the very basic fundaments of the Internet, a network on which to give and receive information, however, as Assmann clearly points out, this system is massively flawed within the tangibility of the information, when you consider that there is no way to tell by who, and when certain pieces of information have been conceived. Although still in quite early days, the Internet has, and will continue to allow humans to look back on our own collective past as a society. The extremely beneficial thing about that is that we are able to gather all of the subjective points of view, and stories that exist surrounding any one subject, and hold on to all possible conclusions.

Creative Essay: Part 2

In Duncan Watts’ piece, ‘Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age’, he discusses the interconnected nature of todays society through the analogy of the six degrees of separation. These findings, conducted by Stanley Milgram concluded that everyone in the world is connected through a network of 6 people. The studies that went into proving this theory, though conducted entirely within one nation, stand up for a larger truth; that being the world is a ‘small’ place, albeit maybe not physically when scaled against what one would typically classify as small, but in terms of the earths inhabitants, and how interconnected we all are.

Screen shot 2014-10-23 at 8.14.58 PM

Image source – Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

Milgram’s study was conducted in 1967, before the Internet existed, and since then Microsoft has gone on to conduct their own study based on Milgram’s original findings, to test the reliability of the theory. As opposed to being a study conducted on a limited number of people in a limited number of states within the US, Microsoft’s study used data on a planetary scale – analyzing 30 billion conversations held between 180 million people worldwide, which amounted to roughly half of the world’s instant messaging for 2006, the year it was conducted. Microsoft’s findings concluded that on average, every person on earth could be connected through 6.6 degrees of separation, with 78 percent of the population being entirely interconnected in as little as 7 steps.

3d small people - global communication

 

Image Source – www.hjsessentia.co.uk/internet-services/

Creative Essay: Part 1

Finally, networked literacies are marked by your participation as a peer in these flows and networks — you contribute to them and in turn can share what others provide.

 Introduction

 As a young adult undertaking study in the field of media in 2014, the future seems somewhat optimistically vague. The Internet has completely thrown the industry into a state of flux unlike we’ve seen before, meaning that the paths one must pursue in order to land themselves a career in the industry have become more opaque, as it is impossible to tell what the required skills for many career paths will involve even five years from now.  Whilst that may sound like a horribly confronting knowledge to possess whilst undertaking this journey, it is also extremely exciting. The Internet has seemingly broken down the geographical barriers that once rendered many isolated, and culturally unaware, and formed a global community, in which one could realistically work for a company in San Francisco, and never actually leave their home in Melbourne. The Internet’s ease of accessibility has globalized the stream of influence people in all fields all around the world look to when creating and sharing content, and in turn created forms of expression that are no longer regionalized, but are formed through the unification of particular cultures on the net.

ahhhhh

Since my run down of the first reading for this week was pretty minimalistic, I decided to give the next one a go… The only problem was in between the discussions about databases and poetic attributes, the reading once again lost my interest and it was just a scramble of words on a page…