Monday
PRESENTATION OUTLINE
- Introduction
- Social Networking
- Flashmobbing
- Dabbawalla's
- Surveillance and Control: Making the most of the System
- Thoughts and Questions?
INTRODUCTION
The Rise of Network Society and Culture:
Should we be worried?
- Kazy’s Varnelis - ‘Networked Publics’:
- Network culture as having succeeded postmodernism and late capitalism = ‘Transcontemporaneity’
- Network culture almost absent-mindedly uses remix as a dominant form
- Network culture delivers remix and reality, shuffling together the diverse elements of present day culture, blithely conflating high and low… while poaching its “as found” aesthetics from the world.”
- Gilles Deluze - 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' (1992):
"Today the self is not so much constituted by any notion of identity but rather is reduced to “dividuals” and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks’."
- In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important that its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as interstices of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.
- Affirming ones own identity today means affirming to the identity of others in a relentless potlatch.
- Art also changes in response to this condition: Much like the contemporary media outlet, both the self and the artist of today is an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others.
Should we be worried?
- Kazy’s Varnelis - ‘Networked Publics’:
- Network culture as having succeeded postmodernism and late capitalism = ‘Transcontemporaneity’
- Network culture almost absent-mindedly uses remix as a dominant form
- Network culture delivers remix and reality, shuffling together the diverse elements of present day culture, blithely conflating high and low… while poaching its “as found” aesthetics from the world.”
- Gilles Deluze - 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' (1992):
"Today the self is not so much constituted by any notion of identity but rather is reduced to “dividuals” and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks’."
- In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important that its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as interstices of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.
- Affirming ones own identity today means affirming to the identity of others in a relentless potlatch.
- Art also changes in response to this condition: Much like the contemporary media outlet, both the self and the artist of today is an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others.
SOCIAL NETWORKING
'Cyberbalkanisation':
- Given the vast number of possible clusters one can associate with, it becomes possible, ultimately, to find a comfortable niche with people just like oneself, among other individuals whose views merely reinforce one’s own.
- It is entirely possible to fabricate the outside world, reducing it to a projection of oneself. Rather than fostering deliberation, blogs can simply reinforce opinions between like-minded individuals. Lacking common platform for deliberation, they reinforce existing differences.
- Moreover, new divisions occur: Humans are able to maintain only a finite number of relationships and as we connect with others at a distance who are more like us, we are likely to disconnect with others in our community who are less like us –
- This was also exposed in an Economist.com article written in December last year:
- “Unlike other networks, social network lose value once they go beyond a certain size. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect (that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users). Already, social networks such as ‘asmallworld.net’, an exclusive network site for the rich and famous, are proliferating.
ASmallWorld.com
- This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline.”
NING.com - create your own networks
- Given the vast number of possible clusters one can associate with, it becomes possible, ultimately, to find a comfortable niche with people just like oneself, among other individuals whose views merely reinforce one’s own.
- It is entirely possible to fabricate the outside world, reducing it to a projection of oneself. Rather than fostering deliberation, blogs can simply reinforce opinions between like-minded individuals. Lacking common platform for deliberation, they reinforce existing differences.
- Moreover, new divisions occur: Humans are able to maintain only a finite number of relationships and as we connect with others at a distance who are more like us, we are likely to disconnect with others in our community who are less like us –
- This was also exposed in an Economist.com article written in December last year:
- “Unlike other networks, social network lose value once they go beyond a certain size. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect (that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users). Already, social networks such as ‘asmallworld.net’, an exclusive network site for the rich and famous, are proliferating.
ASmallWorld.com
- This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline.”
NING.com - create your own networks
FLASHMOBBING
“(FLASH mawb) n. A large group of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse.”
Supermarket Mob
- FlashMobs are organised through loosely affiliated, non-hierarchical networks of people using modern communication technologies, such as mobile phones, the Web and email. They are orchestrated to bring as many bodies as possible together at a pre-arranged time and place to enact a publicly disruptive and spectacular act of ludicrousness
- FlashMobbing could be defined as a great incentive to let off some pressure and steam from our mostly mundane adult lives. We are governed by so many rules in our social and working circles. It attempts to reverse the weakening of spontaneity, and refuse the fall into regular and patterned behaviour.
- FlashMobbers as Cyborgs: the way that they internalise technology, mentally map space based on online geographies, and form networks through text messages, emails, discussion lists and websites would suggest that they are inextricably implicated in modern technologies, and technologies in them. (McLuhanesque?)
- They are cyborgs in the way that their organisation and meetings are not bounded by physical or electronic frontiers – their meetings cross real and virtual space.
- In the way that it injects mechanic strangeness into the everyday, flashmobbing not only draws on a rich tradition of surrealist absurdity, but also taps into the way that the digital has made the external world “hum with the unreal, the strange and the fantastic.”
Other manifestations of network culture:
Spencer Tunick:
The FlashMob and art/photography
FlashMobs and media
The FlashMobs used in advertising
DABBAWALLA's
- In India, where many traditions are being rapidly overturned as a result of globalization, the practice of eating a home-cooked meal for lunch lives on. To achieve that in this sprawling urban amalgamation of an estimated 25 million people, where long commutes by train and bus are routine, Mumbai residents rely on an intricately organized, labor-intensive operation that puts some automated high-tech systems to shame. It manages to deliver tens of thousands of meals to workplaces all over the city with near-clockwork precision!
- The secret of the system is in the colored codes painted on the side of the boxes, which tell the dabbawallas where the food comes from and which railway stations it must pass through on its way to a specific office in a specific building in downtown Mumbaic
Video
SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL: MAKING THE MOST OF THE SYSTEM
"Everywhere we go today we are constantly under surveillance by CCTV networks. Video Sniffin' is way to turn these security devices into your own environmental television studio by plucking the wireless signals from the air and capturing them to your own recording device. Why bother to buy a camera when there are so many already within the environment?"
The Art of Video Sniffing:
Video Sniffin’:
With the help of the art collective Mongrel, a group of homeless teenagers in Southend-on-Sea, made a short film using images they had taken from the very cameras that had been installed to spy on them. After a day on their bikes mapping the network of nearby cameras, they acted out a short script right there in the street, and then "borrowed" the images from CCTV.
Faceless:
A science-fiction movie set in a dystopian future in which time itself has been annulled, leading the world to exist in a state of permanent present. Although Luksch makes movies with CCTV, her methods are different from the sniffers'.
Over a four-year period, Luksch has spent hours performing on the London streets beneath the glare of CCTV cameras and then going through the protracted process of making formal requests to retrieve the images from the cameras' owners. When the tapes arrive, the faces of other passers-by are blanked out in order to protect their identities.
The Duellists:
In March 2007 MediaShed were invited to the Manchester Arndale Shopping Centre as part of the Futuresonic Festival to make a film combining free-media with free-running. Parkour or free-running involves fluid uninterrupted movement adapting motion to obstacles in the environment. Like free-media, free-running makes use of and re-enrgises the infrastructure of the city. Free-media film adapts environmental and discarded hardware to make filmmaking accessible to all.
Working with Southend based professional parkour breakin' crew Methods of Movement a choreographed performance was filmed in the shopping centre over three consecutive nights. The film was shot using only the existing in-house CCTV network of 160 cameras operated from the central control room, with a soundtrack created entirely from the foundsounds and noises recorded during the performance.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Chips:
RFIDs and the ever-growing digital trail of information that we leave behind suggest that in the near future our every action could be tracked, not just by the government but by anyone able to pay for that information as well.
Big Brother - Government Surveillance
CNBC report
SPYCHIPS website
Raising awareness on RFID
Talking Surveillance Cameras
Big Brother in action!
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