Bcm101 W3

BCM101 New Media: Histories/Industries/Practices Wednesday, March 18

Week 3: Online Worlds (Part One) The Web as Media Form

Dr Chris Moore [email protected]

 Case Studies:    

The internet and the idea of the network  The world wide web as a media form

Warning - some detours ahead...

September 6, 2006 by ngader (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ngader/236613122/sizes/o/)

Who invented the internet?

Who  invented the internet?

Was it Bill Gates?

Was it Al 'Information Superhighway Gore?   "...the United State's current national information policy   resembles the worst aspects of our old agricultural policy, which left grain rotting while people were starving. We have warehouses of unused information 'rotting' whole, while critical questions are left unanswered and critical problems are left unsolved” image via: http://josephmarhee.wordpress.com/page/17/

(Gore cited in LaPorte et al 1992).

"I hear they have the internet on computers now. -Homer Simpson

The web and the internet like television, print and radio are all represented in a framework that makes them appear normal, natural and ubiquitous.

the digital divide Castells, M. (2004)  The Network Society: a cross cultural perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. 

"About 50% of India's women are illiterate." Words and image by Rita Banerji, via flickr, March 2007. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rita_banerji /500476241/sizes/m/

It is OK to hate Twitter... as long as you Blog about it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ssandars /87079260/ Image by Scootie, wall tag melbourne victoria, 2006.

Who invented television? It wasn't Raymond Williams – but he wrote about television as a cultural technology.

image via http://my.integritynet.com.au/barkertv/images/murphy%20tv.jpg

The invention of television was no single event or series of events. It depended on a complex of inventions and developments in electricity, telegraphy, photography, motion pictures and radio. It can be said to have separated out as a specific technological objective in the period 1875-1890, and then, after a lag, to have developed as a specific technological enterprise from 1920 through to the first public television systems of the 1930s. Yet in each of these stages it depended for parts of its realisation on inventions made with other ends primarily in view. (Williams, 1974; 7). Williams, Raymond (1974) Television, Fontana, London (2nd ed 2003) Routledge Classics London.

 internet histories

History of the Internet http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=9hIQjrMHTv4

http://www.wordle.net/create

"...think for yourself, question authority [and]...then came Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s. McLuhan said, in the  Socratic sense, the medium is the message, the words you use, the modes of communication you use, determine the realities you inhabit..."   Timothy Leary - Change the Medium (11min:40sec).

The Illawarra Mercury, Page 3.  Saturday, March 14, 2009.

The social shaping of technology –

Typically, and increasingly, technologies come not in the form of separated, isolated devices but as part of a whole, as part of a system.

–

MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985: p. 31).

In space no one can hear a tie fighter scream.

medium (noun, singular): of an intermediate nature. A means of transmitting information and enabling communication.   media (noun, plural): multiple mediums  

mass media (plural): those mediums including print, television and radio designed to reach a large proportion of a population.  

Internet studies hype  dot.com  empirical inquiry  post wave

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raneko/2469861680/

New media cultures The Internet and Web enable new forms of cultural production.   The internet Structures the Experience of the user. The user of the web is a subjectivity of production.   This reconfigures the notions of what is public and what is private.

The Memex

Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974)

Charles Babbage 1791 – 1871: English mathematician whose innovations led to prototypes of a programmable computer. Gottfried Leibnitz  1646 – 1716: was a German natural philosopher whose work provided the theoretical mathematics foundation of modern computer logic.

Associative Memory

Hypertext forms before the internet: footnotes indexes  library catalogue Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1980 developed HTML.

the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML is the language of the web.

Hypertextual

http://www.flickr.com/photos/natematias/33621866/sizes/o/ rubberpaw

http://www.pixellabs.com/images/browserwars.png

critique by design    http://www.flickr.com/photos/schoschie/8903529/

GNU/LINUX

Making do

The Network Society

Always On Transformation of work New economies New subjectivities

Conclusion The Internet is a network of networks. The Web As media form. The social, political, economic and cultural forces that shape these Technologies produce aN unstable pattern of identity and production.

QUESTION: Do you own your new media devices or do they own you?

(What is the message of your medium?)