We got to talking about lists again this week. It was said that lists achieve much more when we think of them as something that aren’t ‘literary’ in a sense. Lists aren’t narratives. Think of micro-blogging, or sites like Twitter and Flickr as being list-building devices.
Bogost mentions the phrase ‘the tyranny of representation’ in last week’s readings. Adrian discussed why representation can be tyrannical by saying the act of narrating is actually an act of arrogance on our half. You can only ever say a little bit about what you’re trying to represent. Narrating, by nature, includes and excludes (in a similar fashion to my discussion about the politics of definitions), however lists are vastly different because they don’t reduce things into meaning. They just simply are.
We talked quickly about why a company such as google hasn’t bought Korsakow (in conjunction with YouTube/online developments in video). Adrian pretty quickly dismissed this question, but touched briefly upon the fact that Korsakow is very different as software to something like YouTube – nothing in YouTube is about rethinking what video is/does, and in this sense it is ‘old media’ because they focus more on audiences and advertising. As an avid YouTube watcher myself, I reckon this is not necessarily true because there are communities of content creators who have incredibly creative takes on what they can achieve through their video medium. For example, one of my favourite YouTubers KickThePJ who studied digital film at university in England and is doing some really fascinating things regarding video content.
Another point which really struck home with me is how multi-linear our day to day activities actually are. When you think of the way we navigate the internet, we often have many tabs open, steam music, check the news, and reply to emails all at the same time. However, there’s no real mainstream idea who what multilinear means. We’re on the cusp of an enormous media change; the media landscape is so different to anything that’s ever been. But we’re still in the middle of the change, we don’t yet know what direction or form those changes are going to take. Twitter, Instagram and Vine are helping to popularise fragmented modes of media. The way we seem to be heading, as our media use becomes more and more niche, is towards creating building systems which do interesting things with these fragments we produce day in and day out.
