Search results for "production "
Production - [Critical Media Concepts and Contexts]
"All that is solid melts into air" (Engels, F. & Marx, K., 1848. The Communist Manifesto) This lecture explored the notion of production, and found that every attempt to pin "production" down ended in the pursuit of something disappearing.
Evaporation du lac by FrancoisRoche on Flickr
Introduction
The ideas presented can be summarised in any one of the following ways:
- an examination of how creativity and production are actually forms of translation and transformation: not making something from nothing (creation) but reworking existing things into new forms (reproduction)
- deconstructing the common perception that human civilisation, with its industrial and manufacturing superstructures which underpin commercial production, represent a form of progress towards an ever better future.
- suggesting that the human production of knowledge is inseparable from the practices and motives which underpin it: it is instrumental, not objective
- tracing the shift away from the object and its aura, towards experience and its commodification
We occasionally looked at the practice of mapping in order to illustrate some of these ideas.
Production as creativity
- Poiesis - production as it is expressed by philosophers like Aristotle and Heidegger. The latter's notion of poiesis is a bringing-forth, like "the bursting of a blossom into bloom" (Heidegger, M., 1954. The Question Concerning Technology) - not the magical creation of things that did not exist before: rather, a liminal, threshold experience which facilitates transformation.
March 19, 2006: Apple tree blossoms by Matt McGee on Flickr
- Memetics and memes - the notion that thoughts, ideas and units of cultural information as they are expressed in our conscious thoughts are transferred and spread from mind to mind as genes are spread from body to body via reproduction. As such humans are merely vehicles - for both genes and memes. The idea was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976. The Selfish Gene) and has been taken up by other commentators on cultural ideas.
- Representation - the basic problems of philosophy revolve around various configurations of three components and their relationships: the world, the subject and representation. Representation might be thought of as the image of the world in our conscious thought. Various different philosophical traditions might argue about the relationship between the world and our image of the world (i.e. the relationship between world and representation). See Arthur C. Danto for a good introduction to the problems of philosophy, (1997. Connections to the World)
Shadow Play by Swamibu on Flickr
We can think then of representation as a reproduction of the world - the image of the world as it appears in human consciousness. A map, too, is a representation of the world. Does conscious human thought "map" accurately onto the world? For that matter, do maps accurately represent the world (consider the reductionism inherent in portraying the multi-dimensional earth in the two dimensions of a piece of paper or a screen)? Representation is a mediated and interpreted image of what is given: a copy of the world, which may be subject to distortion through our imperfect human sensory apparatus. As Shakespeare intimates - we see through a glass, darkly.
The images we work and rework - such as poetry (from the same etymological root as poiesis) are not inventions of language, but the reimplementation and translation of language. Of course language mutates and evolves through use. The introduction of "newness" - variety, diversity, heterogeneity might be comparable to the evolution of new species: iterative mutation induced through erroneous copying. The "meme" is the cultural manifestation of the biological gene.
Creativity, then might not be about a godlike ability to conjure things into existence from nothing, but part of the work of constant change and transformation that human beings enter into. There is no production, there is only reproduction, and - thankfully - reproduction is given to error?
translation by Swiv on Flickr
Production as the material and immaterial means of production and reproduction
- The parasite - the parasite is an organism which exploits a host without returning any benefit. Michael Serres' philosophical work (1984, The Parasite) provokes the thought that reproduction is a parasitical process. We might note that our industrial production processes viewed at the planetary level might be seen as rather parasitical.
- Complexity and reductionism - trying to understand either the material or immaterial systems which encompass contemporary culture requires getting to grips with prohibitively complex networks of interrelated factors, so we take short cuts (systems theory, marxism, discourse analysis, etc). Niklas Luhmann's development of systems theory - especially his application of it to the mass media (1996. The Reality of the Mass Media) is instructive here.
- Mechanical reproduction - understanding reproduction (and what it is we are reproducing) is one of the ways which people (especially marxists) have used to try to analyse the relationship between 'production' and culture.
No471701 by . SantiMB . on Flickr
- Marxism - a inescapably important thread of cultural analysis for over 150 years. You can find more about marxism here and ideology here. A marxist analysis of production might lead us to conclude that our acts of production and reproduction are aimed at little more than the continual reproduction of the means and conditions of our being able to engage in acts of production and reproduction. This might help us to understand everything from the resilience of capitalism to Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" (1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man).
- Aura - the important and influential writer Walter Benjamin, who emerged form the important and influential Frankfurt School (who criticised the capital-oriented culture industry), analysed mechanical reproduction as leading to the loss of 'aura' of the work of art: the 'authentic' unique object of pilgrimage becomes the disposable object of consumption (1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Wither, and whither, the aura?
- Aesthetics, politics and fascism - Benjamin's sometimes equivocal essay (sometimes appearing to celebrate processes of democratisation and rebellion against the authority of tradition) also suggests that mechanical reproduction opens art up to exploitation for political purposes (i.e. propaganda); essentially, the co-option of art by those seeking power helped to facilitate the rise of fascism. He suggests that the aestheticisation of politics (in contemporary terms, this might be seen in the triumph of PR in politics) should be combated by the politicisation of art.
- Technological determinism - the suggestion that human lives are shaped by the technologies they invent. This idea is often ridiculed, since it is taken, in extremis, to argue that human beings have no freedom or agency. It is nevertheless a useful concept when thinking about how, for example, the built environment determines human behaviour: think about how the architecture of spaces like supermarkets and airports 'funnel' your movements. The argument here might be how much this is influenced by technology (which after all, human beings "create") and how much our behaviour is socially learned and constructed. See Henri Lefebvre (1974. The Production of Space) or Marc Augé (1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) on the way we make, and are made by, space.
Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology by gadl on Flickr
Imagine I create a web page with an interactive map. My act of production of this web-based product relies on a precariously constructed network of immaterial labour interacting with the material conditions which facilitate and shape it. I utilise APIs providing textually represented information to write codes implemented by browsers using interpreters based on formats produced by assemblages of people working commercially towards shareholder profit or in open source collectives for infinitely varied motives, using complex stacks of code layers whose material manifestations essentially consist of the configuration of magnetised atoms on slivers of semi-conductors, co-opted into the mediation and storage of binary digits.
labyrinthine circuit board lines by quapan on Flickr
As of November 2009, the internet weighs 498, 438,559,990 kg (2009. Slashdot, How Heavy is the Internet?). How does one begin to untangle the complex web of interactions which go into the production of something which has only existed for a few decades and yet has grown mind-bogglingly large? And what perspectives might we take on the partner to our exponential growth in material production and reproduction? The partner of production is consumption: what ways can we hope to make sense of the consumption of resources that our production necessitates? How many more internets' worth of plastic and metal waste do we dump in landfills every year?
Calgary NW Landfill - 3 by D'Arcy Norman on Flickr
The interactions between the many actors which constitute the material and immaterial nodes in the networks of production and reproduction which facilitate our work as makers of digital artefacts, writers of diegeses on paper, copiers of performances onto photographic film, are extraordinarily complex, and all mutually embedded in and amongst each other. To pull out nodes from the network is to inevitably foreground certain figures and to discount other grounds. Such disembeddings are reductive: they try to simplify and by doing so, exclude. Only with such caveats should we proceed.
Production as the narrative of human knowledge
- Instrumental reason - the idea that human knowledge strives towards ever greater objective truth is a problematic idea; we might wonder if human knowledge is much more instrumental - i.e. partially directed towards purposes and outcomes.
- Teleology - the idea of future purpose. Humans often behave teleologically - believing that we are making progress, that we are working towards purposes. Instrumental reason as described above is exemplary of telelogically directed activities. But we might also question whether 'progress' is inevitably towards better things.
![Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2787/4081543252_bf844a2e86.jpg)
Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham on Flickr
Consider maps and their relation to human perception and space and place to illustrate this. Early maps do not show aerial views, but human level perspectives. Naturalistic attempts at spatial and geographical "accuracy" (i.e. attempting to create spatially representative images of coastlines, cities and roads: "geography" literally means the drawing of the earth) is a late invention: earlier maps showed boundaries as perfectly circular, rivers as straight, important buildings as circles, etc. It is too simple to say that these early maps are "less accurate": actually they were trying to achieve something other than the naturalistic representation that we seek in maps.
Centro storico by zZeta on Flickr
Do maps get better as they get more naturalistically representative? Or, do they perhaps just serve different (rather than better) purposes? A contemporary geological map might be very useful to someone looking for minerals, but incomprehensible to most other people. Cook's mapping of the antipodes was as much a part of, and inseparable from, the practice of empire-building aided with ships and guns, as it was about charting navigable routes or creating disinterested representations of the natural world in order to have a more complete and objective understanding of it.
Some concluding remarks
- Simulacrum - Jean Baudrillard (1985. Simulacra and Simulation) imagined the world we inhabit as being a simulacrum - a 1:1 map of the world, rather than the world itself. The world of representation - that image world which humans construct around themselves, the world of mediation - is the world we inhabit. This world of experience is no longer "authentic" - its aura has withered as it has become an endlessly reproducible commodity. Experience has become the commodity produced for the purpose of consumption.
streetview by dq. on Flickr
Google Streetview is close to showing us the 1:1 map of the world - an external environment centred around the roads and commercial centres which structure our lives. Have we disappeared into that frozen mediated world in which nothing occurs but exchange, capital, and commerce? Are there no more geographies to explore or maps to produce, and are we now only left to consume the endlessly reproduced products of a culture industry? Have we disappeared into the map, or can we use the map to create authentic experiences? Perhaps we can escape the tyranny of consumption by becoming producers of our own experiences, using the resources of the given world: like the flâneur - the stroller and seeker of visions - of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin?
BlakeWalkers by joeflintham
DJ Spooky has likened DJs to contemporary "troubadours", and that the artistry of remixing "found" sounds and samples is part of a new digital folk culture. (Birringer, J. 2008. Performance, Technology and Science, New York: PAJ Publications). The direct comparison here is with oral cultures in which the same stories are used and retold, each telling generates new rhythms and themes, resonances and meanings. Traditional music lovers might long for "real" music - as though the sound produced by a bow on a cello is somehow more "authentic" than a sample of a sample of a sample. Where is originality, newness, creativity and authenticity?
Is the DJ a parasite on the creative work of artists nurtured by the culture industry? Or is industry capital a parasite on the productive work of the artist? Or are the works themselves, the audio ephemera, around which such praxis and commerce revolve: the memes - are these the real parasites?
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-07-30T07:37:25Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/
put this in your feedreaders!
Tags: george-orwell diary literature writing politics journal orwell
 - World of Ends
Because the Internet is an agreement, it doesn't belong to any one person or group
Tags: internet participation technology web
 - "The internet's output is data, but its product is freedom". Many-to-Many:
The core virtue of the internet was a huge increase in the technical freedom of all of its participating nodes, a freedom that has been translated into productive and intellectual freedoms for its users.
Tags: internet participation freedom technology information
 - A Low Impact Woodland Home
Tags: ecology architecture
 - We Tell Stories - 'The 21 Steps' by Charles Cumming
google-map-based mashup adaptation of 39 Steps
Tags: google map mashup fiction adaptation spatiality
 - Universal goes DRM-free - Boing Boing
Tags: universal copyright RIAA piracy DRM
 - Summary of Findings: Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations
People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance
Tags: news journalism msm
 - BBC NEWS | Technology | State of Play: Violence and video games
BBC on videogames is never a pretty sight. Here's some more bollocks
Tags: media-effect game videogame violence
 - if:book: "the bookish character of books": how google's romanticism falls short
Google's ambition to organizing the world's books and making them universally accessible and useful is being carried out in a hasty, slipshod manner, leading to a serious deficit in quality
Tags: library book digital google archive techno-utopianism
 - Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net
Our visions of the landscape can now be filtered through a digital interface. Collectively these visions form a snapshot of the townscape and the personal topographies of the auteurs
Tags: video form space landscape history mediation
 - E
elit links
Tags: literature hypertext e-literature
 - Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy - P2P Foundation
the ?creative economy? of the urban music, arts and fashion scenes, which is growing in importance as a productive externality for the creative industries proper, is not primarily motivated by monetary incentives
Tags: economy ethics gift-economy media-participation
 - if:book: six blind men and an elephant
This idea of "whole books" as rungs on a ladder toward knowing something. Books are a kind of conceptual architecture that, until recently, has been distinctly absent on the Web
Tags: book library expertise knowledge information participation research
 - Waggish: Grondin on Gadamer
Writing is self-alienation. Overcoming it, reading the text, is thus the highest task of understanding
Tags: gadamer hermeneutic tradition writing
 - Spamgraffiti | Online installations created from spam
spam art
Tags: spam gallery graffiti art
 - Blogging Resources / Participatory Media Literacy
Tags: blog blogging resources
 - things magazine: an online journal about objects and meanings
cassette nostalgia = "yet another way of extracting the lingering analogue bits of our lives"
Tags: nostalgia tape cassette music analogue
 - Stuart Moulthrop: Essays
essays on hypertext, literacy, game, play, etc
Tags: hypertext fiction literature
 - SeeqPod Playable Search - Find. Discover. Watch. Listen. Share.
it must be awesome cos I found a moog version of Smells Like Teen Spirit
Tags: audio search
 - drawball.com
interactive social drawing thing
Tags: visualisation social drawing flash interactive
 - Communication Theorists Enter Hardware and Software Studies at WRT: Writer Response Theory
advancements in technology will increase qualitative and biological indicators of immersion
Tags: game immersion narrative story media-effects physiology violence
 - YouTube - Content Aware Image Resizing
cool image resizing tool
Tags: image production
 - Free Speech Sometimes Trumps Copyright
legal argument that copyright inhibits freedom of speech
Tags: copyright censorship freedom-of-speech US law
 - Mission Stencil Story - a set on Flickr
"an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco"
Tags: writing streetart interactive fiction urban space
 - CONELRAD | DAISY VIDEO
The Daisy Video - political campaign add with "a little child innocently counting juxtaposed with an adult military countdown"
Tags: video politics US advertising
 - Reverse Geocoder for Google Maps API Documentation
Reverse Geocoding is the inverse relationship where each geographical coordinate is mapped to the nearest known address
Tags: map google ajax api geodecoding
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The Science of the Life of the Metaphorical City
Imported from Menticulture
Saigon is like all the other great cities of the world. It's the mess left over from people getting rich.
Old audiences, new producers
Imported from Menticulture
Hypermediate Radio, part 2
Imported from Menticulture
Hypermediate Radio, part 1
Imported from Menticulture
Biblipedia beta site
The biblipedia beta site went live in November 2006, but what with, um, everything, I've been lax in posting details here.
The site is currently living at www.biblipedia.net
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2006-11-17T08:25:55Z]
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2006-07-27T19:02:57Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Nobel Intent: Science and the internet echo chamber
Tags: science internet
- Infinite Loop: Director coming to Intel Macs, says Adobe
Tags: multimedia director production
- Next Generation - Can Games Make You Cry?
Tags: game affective toread
- Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: How large is the long tail?
Tags: long-tail
- Listening Post
Tags: RIAA piracy law kazaa p2p file-sharing
- blog.myspace.com/billybragg
Tags: myspace license
- Slashdot | India Rejects One Laptop per Child Program
Tags: digital-divide
Biblipedia consultation
Today we had a meeting with various interested parties to discuss the directions that Biblipedia could go in.
Here's a copy of the presentation [Flash].
Some of the key themes that emerged were:
- is it appropriate to drive use of Biblipedia via assessment?
- is it meant to be a learning tool or a research mechanism (or both)?
- what kind of quality control might need to be implemented to avoid 'mis-readings' to be perpetuated?
- how should it be piloted?
From my point of view, it was really good to get feedback from the 'outside' :)
Biblipedia Vision and Scope document
I've added version 1.0 of the vision / scope document. This lays out the pedagogic basis for a tool such as Biblipedia, and defines the major functionality and justification.
Over the next weeks, I'll be finalising the detailed specifications and functionality, and post that spec here for information :)
User-contributed content and quality
Biblipedia, like any wiki, will only ever be as good as the content that users put into it, notwithstanding technology behind it.
Recently there have been a number of debates about how to exercise reasonable control over user-contributed content and thereby maintain quality, while ensuring the openness of discourse.
The Register and Wikipedia were involved in a war over the quality of the entries in Wikipedia. Most people were sympathetic to Wikipedia, taking the line that it was never intended to be the only, authoritative source for information - more a gateway, while people like Dave Winer sided with the Register, perhaps because they had had personal issues with information about them on Wikipedia. Nature then did an analysis which seemed to close off the debate, showing that Wikipedia actually stood up very well to Britannica's online encyclopedia.
In just the last week or so, the Washington Post withdrew its comment functionality from its blog after only a short period, much to the contempt of most commentators, who think that the print press still don't get the web.
Dion Hinchliffe has some comments on how to make the witeable web a responsible place, which mostly centres on barrier to entry and establishment of identity.
The extent to which we close off contributions to Biblipedia to anonymous users is up for debate. It may be that full functionality (creation of bibliographical entries) may be restricted to registered users, but mightn't it be possible to allow guest users to contribute comments on such entries too?
One of my goals in this enterprise is to engage with the idea of the Read / Write Web, and not perpetuate the Read-Only Web that Lawrence Lessig decries.
Folksonomies and collaborative organisation
It's worth thinking about some of the ideas behind folksonomies - which are, after all not new in the grand scheme of things, since 'folk taxonomies' have been studied in social sciences and anthropology for some time.
Dion Hinchliffe refers to the use of collaborative folksonomies in social websites as essential to 'harnessing collective intelligence'.
There's a nice intro to some of the conceptual ideas behind social networking at the IEEE Computer Society website - and it's worth bearing in mind that nodes can be people, discrete chunks of information... or even books ;)
Clay Shirky, also, is an advocate of 'distributed' intelligence, and has an interesting presentation on why ontologies are overrated.
Finally, with an eye on some of the more prosaic problems of designing collaborative software that uses a folksonomy, what format should tags be?!
Annotatable Audio
Back in November of last year some details emerged about a project the BBC is working on - Annotatable Audio.
This is similar in principle to things like delicious and flickr, and therefore Biblipedia, in that discrete pieces of content are described and tagged by users in order to make that content more eaily navigable.
A good explanation of the project is given at journalism.co.uk. Also, Tom Coates was working on this before moving to Yahoo and has interesting things to say about it.
SCORM
Shareable Content Object Reference Model (whatis?).
An interesting question that came up at the MAG meeting in which I introduced Biblipedia was whether it would be SCORM compliant.
There are a number of aspects to this question:
- We can provide SCORM-compliant info and metadata about Biblipedia
- We want to talk to other databases, and it would help enormously if they were SCORM compliant
- Biblipedia is not a 'course' as such, so that kind of metadata is not relevant
- To what extent do we open up a public Biblipedia API to unauthenticated users?
Edition disambiguation
Library Thing refered to this problem: edition disambiguation.
There are two aspects to the problem:
- how do we ensure that a user can enter notes on the correct edition that they're using?
- How do we avoid those notes then being isolated from notes about other editions?
A key idea is that notes about all editions of a piece of writing (eg an essay, which may be reproduced in any number of reader editions) should be accessible together...
Plagiarism issues
One of the major issues that needs to be addressed is the potential for students to use Biblipedia as a shortcut for doing real research and literature reviews.
For example, a possible part of the functionality will be the ability for individual users to create Bibliographical lists for specific essays which they can print off for inclusion in their work.
Making such lists public to all users could be a very powerful way of sharing knowledge - but also could make it easy for other users to print off such lists and pass them off as their own.
The real question here is not so much whether to make such lists public, but rather whether we intend to be optimisitc about how users behave, or whether to expect and plan for the worst...
MAG Consultation
I introduced Biblipedia to the Media Academic Group at Bournemouth University this week. Initial feedback was very positive :)
Now it's important to get as many people as possible to contribute ideas and suggestions.
The success of Biblipedia will depend on staff and students using it and adding enough content to make the relational nature of the content useful.
I think people are more likely to use it in teaching and contribute entries to the database if there is transparency and collaboration in the making of the tool. Any feedback and suggestions are welcome - you can add comments using the link below any of these entries, including this one.
I'll also be planning a meeting in the new year to invite people to discuss issues and opportunities.
COPAC
COPAC is one of the options available as a free online bibliographical database which Biblipedia can talk to.
It uses z39.50 as an interchange format on an open TCP port.
Biblipedia Protoype
The prototype for Biblipedia is starting to grow at the prototype page.
This is a rapid prototype which uses the Content Management System I've been developing over the last year for other purposes, and so the functionality and design don't necessarily represent the final decisions :)
Bibliographical data integration
One of the key challenges in developing Biblipedia will be standardising bibliographical entries, so that people don't have to enter the book data from scratch.
Ideally, we should be able to talk to a web service which accepts ISBN numbers in order to retrieve bibliographical data easily. Amazon already offers such web services, and there are other open dbs which use Z39.50.
Social bibliography tool
There's a tool called Library Thing which already exists for the purpose of sharing tagged books.
This has the tags, a space for comments, and integration using ISBN which is handy.
