topic?

Skate videos:

• Media production within a parallel economy.
• Subcultural media.
• Alternative models?

packt like sardines

Compression might be seen as a cultural trope.

networked liveness

Holmes (2005, Communication Theory: Media, Technology and Society) argues that 'liveness', as an aesthetic, industrial, experiential quality of a given medium, is only possible with broadcast media, such as television, but also asynchronous media like newspapers. That's the key too, liveness as a category is not defined by the fact that a 'real world' event is being produced and received at the exact same time ('nowness') but rather that, in effect, the medium is live with itself. Considering television as an example, Holmes identifies the sense of liveness not so much with a live program broadcast but rather the very fact that such a broadcast could interrupt at any point. Or, in another sense, as Heath & Skirrow (Television, A World in Action. Screen 18.2 (Summer 1977): 7-59) observe, "Like the world, television never stops, is continuous" - that is to say that TV is always there, even when the set is turned off. Or newspapers, the fact of its liveness comes from that everyone attends to the medium more or less at the same time and that its contents are exhausted and outmoded on a daily basis - no one reads the paper from last Wednesday, as Holmes notes, in fact we don't even tend to see it (it gets pulped or recycled as quickly as possible.

So i've only gone through all these examples to get to the constitutive features of liveness itself: a medium must be synchronous with itself, and the audience must attend to it at more or less the same time, and be aware of such .

Now, considering this, I take issue with Holmes characterisation of liveness as only pertaining to broadcast, in fact, I'd argue that there is a sense in which all mediums are live insofar as they are continuous with their own present. And yet you could say that that is only one half of the live equation, but I'd also argue that network forms have their own peculiar liveness: such as online RSS readers, that are updated the moment a blog post goes online, and not only that technical fact but also the cultural anxiety that many people feel whilst sitting at work with their reader open and nothing to do - they too are sutured into that technology's (application's?) liveness. Even video games, which by virtue of being networked through services such as Xbox Live, carry their own sense of cotemporality (triangulated between the instance of access, the medium's own time, and the time of other players).

Maybe its not the exact same contours of liveness that television maintains, but network mediums still hold that possibility of being live.

kick flip shuffle

Similarities between the iPod (or digital music player) and skateboard as (symptomatic, normative) urban technologies: both change the texture of the city precisely by denying it. The skateboarder empties the ideological connotations of the handrail, for example, (a crutch for consumption) by grinding down it; the iPod user blocks out the discord of the urban sounscape by reconstructing a personal sonic mosaic that inverts the relation between body and city (the former no longer dictating the latter, rather vice versa). Yet the problem inherent in both these strategies is that they fail to analyse or critique precisely the ideological structures of the urban, to confront and truly change (challenge) them. They are only temporary tactics.

energizer

Someone should rock a cultural studies of the battery. Maybe it's been done. But really, if it hasn't - c'mon! These things are a massively significant cultural trope. A wealth of ideas.

cramming

lulz

web reading

Just a quick one: how do blogs and the applications used to access them (RSS Readers) change the practice/mode of reading prior to the text? Is it not that they increase the propensity towards extensive, rapid reading rather than contemplation? Is the speed of reading finally achieving parity with the speed of consumption? Does anyone read books anymore, and if so is that now a productive thing in the politics of reading?

don't get any big ideas

How might one model the Nude Remix project? Well, it's pretty representative of things as they are musically at the moment - a hybrid broadcast/network thing:Wow, that's terrible ... Some explanation:

• Radiohhead/Nude are the broadcaster, the centre - regardless of the whole 'you can do what you want with our song' remix contest thing, which has been played out similarly countless times before, the primacy of the original always stands. But no longer as the authoritative master-text, but rather a sort of set of signifiers to be put to use, shuffled (now that's a cultural mode!). The Internet mediation of this whole exercise just exacerbates the level, not the quality, of this remix comp in relation to previous ones (?). This is not the death of the authored-text, but its reconstitution in network.
  
• All the lines coming off the circle are the remix stems - clearly I wasn't going to draw 2,254 lines so you'll just have to imagine that many (that's what the poorly-drawn infinity symbol is for too). They stand alone to one another but are all crucially linked through the fulcrum of the original song and the voting system, which I suppose is what those lines between the stems represent. But then that's not accurate, because as per the vote mechanism I would need to structure this thing as a dual hierarchy (a two-step flow?) - the top is Nude originally, with a hierarchised network of remixes below that have their own top and bottom (most/least votes or plays). Shit this is getting complicated.
• By design (website design too) there is nothing that would seem to privilege any one remix over the other for voters prior to its content (considering the title as content too - who wants to listen to the 'Nude Beethoven-Heiligenstabt Remix'?). But then the way the front page defaults to viewing the top ten remixes by 'most popular' creates a kind of domino effect where the ten on display there are continually voted for more often (just because they are there, easily accessible) than the thousands of others that lie in the 'random' button.
  
• Then of course, I'd need to add something to represent the outside of the site, because clearly influencing the number of votes something garners is its promotion on other websites, blogs, editorials, etc. These all have their own hierarchies. This is getting silly.

If anything, this whole thing proves the futility of modelling events like this. What I just wanted to get at originally, which almost escapes me now, is that democratisation/diffusion of control is only ever ostensible; the producer's power is crystallised by being spun off into countless user iterations. And that sums up Web 2.0 and music's existence on it.

digital materiality

This whole notion of things being disembodied, de-textured, immaterial, etc. in the digital realm is obviously bullshit. Of course, others have already said this far more smartly than myself, but I'm just throwing this down here as a way of reminding myself of the fact when I start to hate mp3s. I'm not backing down from that position, because there's still a specific materiality to them against 'physically realised' music media, and they offer different kinds of potential, but it's worth just noting a few points:

• The electronic versions of physical artefacts, digital originaries and information all have material characteristics intimately related to the hardware and the software of their creation, circulation and archival/preservation.
• In the case of digital 'versions' of the physical, there is an additional quasi-materiality that emerges from the recall of the physical 'original' - take the album cover image as it appears on later generation iPods, for instance.
• In the case of digital originaries (that is, those digital elements that have no physical correlate/model), they still retain their own materiality related to how they are interfaced and constituted.

Just to finish this off in a thoroughly aliterate way - let's think about the Zerg, one of three races the player can choose to play with in the madly awesome and wildly popular (esp. in South Korea) computer game Starcraft. These dudes are slimy, hive-minded insectoids that are kind of conceptual cousins to the invertebrate human-technologies of our man Cronenberg (think eXistenZ). Playing as this race consists of its own unique bodily, affective matter - the player click interface is actually this disgusting kind of flesh-plate thing that wraps around the controls and map:


I'm not going to nerd out much further, but if you've ever played this game just think about its material experience. With the Zerg too it is intimately tied to the sounds the little hatchlings make when they spawn into different species, the wordless growls and gutteral snarls that make up the call-responses of the characters when you click on them - sound itself is something that carries its own materiality and that, whilst of course shifting/mutating, ranges across the digital and the analogue.

Stay tuned for a run-down on the psychic hauntology of the Protoss and the flesh-made-metal Futurist dream of the Terrans! (jk.)

rattling carriages

Our (public transport) commute is primarily an affective sonic exchange/experience. When I sit on the train those times when I decide not to envelop myself in my headphones (let's not talk about this point itself, it's been exhausted), I realise the extent to which sound itself regulates, simulates, constitutes, reflects, the urban. The focus on the visual for what seems like an inordinate amount of time in urban studies neglects this, and at times it's as if (late) modernity itself were one big sound. ("The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise" - Aldous Huxley). The following is a short narrative of a train travel, and it is of course quite limited - there are many other sounds and events it fails to consider (rattling carriages, the silence between empty seats, the draft of Melbourne Central platforms, and that is to not even consider other modes of movement - think of the grinding paper noise of when those little green things stamp a date on your metcard on buses and trams, of the crunch of a tram wheel against its tracks, ...). But I digress - all aboard!

There is the de-personalised paternal voice of the ubiquitious service announcer, omnipresent across all platforms and stops, "Good morning passengers, ...", that signals your entry into the womb of public transport, the "claustrophobic commuter's Hades" of the city loop.

This place itself has a mode of hearing all of its own, borne of the compression (?) of the tunnel, when you are made aware of the actual sounds of the train itself, with nothing else like nature to interrupt. As a child I the city loop was futuristic, adventurous, slightly unsettling, too. I put that down to the particular play of light that came about in the carriage under darkness, it seemed like a flourescent cocoon. But now I realise it was as much that suffused, technological sound of the train itself that gave me this image.

Out to the suburbs, once past Flinders St or Southern Cross (which strangely fails miserably to sound like as if you are indeed in a whale's belly, and even though it looks as such, you could further say that it fails to feel like that too, rather cold and drafty. Drafts are the scourge of internality), you are within an entirely different acoustic space. Here the train is given a chance to spray its acoustic field across the suburb-scape, and apart from what still feels/sounds somewhat sophisticated in the rise and fall of the train's speed-sound, the majority of hearings here are ones of frustration. The voice of the paternal (?) woman telling you that the next station is, the train is now arriving at, Nondescript Suburban Stop - oftentimes malfunctioning so it comes out crackled and garbled through the ancient speakers, a disquieting interruption of noise into the smoothly oiled machine of transportation, the physicality of sound that sets off grumbles and snaps sleepers back to wakefulness. Be it from these speakers too, or a far more acoustmatic disturbance, the trip is often carried along with an excessively high-pitched and quiet ringing. You almost internalise it and take it with you into your work, school, home, shopping centre. Walking does not kill it.

There is that point at which the train arrives at a stop, and in coming to a halt it lurches ever-so-slightly, leaning forward more than it logically should have and then agonisingly waiting a second or so before it falls back to where it should have been. This moment in the carriage is possibly the most nerve-racking experience of the entire trip, but 'nerve-racking' is probably not the right description - because you feel this in your being, for me it's in my back. And there is a distinct sound that accompanies this movement, subtle but also adding an extra layer of disturbance to the act. I never forget when the train fails to 'fall back' that tiny increment, and stays forward those few millimetres, milliseconds. This throws my entire day, my entire being, out of order.

And then there are those beeping doors, a sound more prominent on the older models where one must force the doors open manually (and it goes without saying that this can be compared to the new metallic box models and the rarely sighted Siemens Malfunction Master 3000s; each model is constitutive of an entirely unique sonic experience). There is something about the particular chime of this beep that has been uniquely engineered to give one the shits, but the frustration it registers itself speaks to something far more complex. Although I'm not sure what.

Maybe it's found in the wished-for automation of experience - travelling (hearing) on these trains makes one dream of a space in which nothing makes a sound, as it were, save maybe for a few slick, futuristic slides and increments. Not the crushing bodily malfunctions of these beeping doors, the broken announcing speakers. It's a wish to desert the body, which itself is a wish to desert machines, those steam-punk monstrosities that populate our world, replacing them with a perfect virtuality. And yet to cherish (or at least to hear) these beeps, this noise, even though it is a sonic imposition on our affective state, is in a sense to reassert our humanity, our physical being.

writing

Write with more feeling and creativity. Stop lifeless, formalist, instrumental engineer writing.

old ads

You know the kind; commercials that originally aired in the 90s or something and somehow are still being shown intermittently on networks, like legitimately.

What is happening here? There's a specific audience reaction to this fact, a moment of viewing that is rendered strange as we recognise the inevitable history of our viewership, not as if totally suspended in the immediate present (which you'd think consumer culture would be at pains to maintain this 'ideology'? So why show old ads?).

Needs more.

young people as media producers

I know the prosaic quality of many of these ramblings is stifling, but I must persist. It's only schematics.

I suppose Jenkins is onto something with the whole participatory culture, but of course I still have marked reservations about the foundations of his arguments. Nevertheless, when I sit here and think about all my friends, myself, all I can think about is the fact that we likely produce more media than almost we consume, in real terms too (not in some 'the text is completed by the receiver' metaphoric mode). Social networks, bands, photos, videos, gig flyers, songs, journalism, blogs, etc.

Taken from a long-range viewpoint, there is certainly a generational shift in the level (and nature, but that's the difficult part) of media production by 'everyday' actors. Its implications are huge, and I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff concerning and analysing all this, but I just thought for myself to get this main point down.

Of course, yeah, it is structured by a particular media-historical moment. Namely one that tends towards production as consumption, niche markets, interactive/personalised digital technologies, a general will to self-direct, etc. All that needs taking into account in understanding this new complex, but the questions are also about its effects, not just causes.

Ah yes, creative industries - the whole QUT thing. But I'm specifically talking about dispered social actors here, not necessarily attached to particular 'industries' or corporate arrangements. It's more diffuse, more widespread. Knowledge economies. Yes, yes.

Well I've thoroughly made myself useless. But may as well put this up nonetheless.

social networking control

A great chunk from Nealon's Foucault Beyond Foucault, thanks to event mechanics:

... the intensification of biopower. In a world of cyber-work, e-commerce, distance education, virtual markets, home health care, and the perpetual retraining of flexibly specialized labor, the disciplinary world of partitioning and surveillance (the office, the school, the bank, the trading floor, the mall, the hospital, the factory) seems like it’s undergoing a wholesale transformation. As Deleuze argues, “We’re // definitely moving toward ‘control’ societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. . . . We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate [primarily] by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. . . . In a control-based system, nothing’s left alone for long.” Deleuze further elaborates on the Foucaultian distinction between discipline and control: “In disciplinary societies, you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything—business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation” of power. So, following the Foucaultian logic of power we’ve been developing here, as societies of control extend and intensify the tactics of discipline and biopower (by linking training and surveillance to evermore-minute realms of everyday life), they also give birth to a whole new form. And this emergence comes about through what Foucault calls a “swarming [l’essaimage] of disciplinary mechanisms,” through the intensification of discipline rather than its exhaustion or dissipation: “The massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control”. Panoptic disciplinary surveillance in the contemporary world of “control” has been taken to a new, even more disembodied and therefore efficient state; your Web browser, your DNA, your bank ATM card, your subway pass, or your credit report all suggest that you are tracked in ways that make the disciplinary or panoptic warehousing of bodily traces (like photographs, surveillance tapes, fingerprints, or blood types) seem positively quaint by comparison (67-68).

Social networks. Facebook - the demand to update, picture tagging, news feeds, 'less of' / 'more of', events, groups, markets... An infinite sorting and reunification, a "universal transmutation" that is carried out only by further atomisation and analysis of the individual's entire autobiography.

Addendum: And yet entirely social - it is a system of dividuals, a stand alone complex.

the moment of truth

It is striking just how lucid the social system can be sometimes - and these moments, particular in media, always interest me, when a particular text or object performs or illuminates, as it were, it's very conditions of existence. In 'The Mass Ornament', Kracauer notes: "The surface-level expressions ... by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things ... The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulse illuminate each other reciprocally".

From the ever-reliable Fox:

"On The Moment of Truth, the challenge is simple -- answer 21 increasingly personal questions honestly, as determined by a polygraph, and win up to $500,000. This is the only game show where participants know both the questions and the answers before they begin to play. Prior to playing, participants are strapped to a lie detector and asked a series of questions by a polygraph expert, who records their answers. At any time, between the polygraph and the televised game, participants can change their answers or walk away from the competition.

To win $500,000 participants have to tell the truth. Of course, the questions are easier when the stakes are low – but as the prize amount increases, they will be challenged to fess up to matters they might normally lie about. The touchier questions could be especially revealing because participants reveal their answers in front of spouses, relatives and friends, hanging on every word. What deep dark secret will someone divulge for hundreds of thousands of dollars?"

Of course, the truth of this program is the very truth of capitalism itself: risk your disembodied self and others in escalating conditions of return, for the ultimate goal is in fact the means; money overcomes all. "This $100,000 will be a fresh start," says the husband of the contestant who has just discovered his partner is keeping a secret from him that could potentially ruin their marriage, in order of course to make that very money. Capitalism is thus a disavowal of our selves, our relationships to others. Thanks Marx, but I've got Fox to tell me (and sell me) that now.