Recently I was reading this mashable article discussing the way in which Second Life has become an arena for Islamic communities to display their identities, and interact with other communities from around the world, both Islamic and not. What really interested me though, from the visual standpoint, was the discussion of the protest that occurred on Second Life. In this virtual world, reality was being displayed as a virtual protest was made of the violence happening on the Gaza Strip. The protesters used the virtual world to display images of a reality happening (I highly recommend, if you are interested in the political discussion, that you go beyond the fold on this link and read the comments below). The virtual reality, in the moment of protest, becomes surprisingly real. It does more than reflect a reality, it makes commentary on it with images of violence, destruction, and death. This is then catalogued in news sources like protests taking place on the actual streets of cities (though usually on a smaller scale).
So what do we do with this? I think there is an idea of the novelty of this inflating its current importance...but really, I think what is more interesting is the way this points to a path to a virtual exploration of complicated and troubling issues, as well as a way to bring people from widely differing backgrounds together to discuss the issues in a way that is not only peaceful, but could possibly becomes very effective. Imagine the virtual worlds with millions of players world wide demonstrating these values...what's more, imagine the very walls being made up of images of protest. The effectiveness of the medium then becomes reflective largely of the popularity of the medium.
There is something different about the interactive, and virtual nature of created worlds though that seprates it even from social programs like facebook and twitter...something that isn't being used to its full effectiveness yet but could definately become an interesting realm where the visual encompasses everything...and where the words become secondary to the experience of that visual. When a person surroundings are not so much reality, but a visual rendering of such...how does that situate the individual and how they react to the world. And how do protests made on virtual mediums affect the world at large?
What do we say about the idea that the protest images are a visual rendering in a visual world...a world that is being used not only to create social interactions between people, but to create an alternate reality for people? When do we stop considering virtual worlds entertainment and start considering them a part of the fabric of our realities, and has this already happened? I don't know the answers to most of these questions, but I do know the visual interactive medium is starting to change the way we think about real world events. It is already demonstrating itself as our phones define the way we interact with the world...defining us through twitter and facebook posts...even if we aren't the ones posting. These are already being taken seriously by major companies, and as these ideas become more and more prevalent we are going to find the mediums through which we socially interact become more technological, and more definingly virtual.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
Twittering Away...captioning lives.
I kind of wanted to continue on the idea of twitter as a tool to caption lives. Have you seen the information on the new twitter that is being rolled out recently. It is actually somewhat interesting, as it adds even more features of interconnectivity between users, but more importantly, they are trying to make it easier to embed visual media. According to their site...they are making it "easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube" . I said in my last post that I was conceiving of twitter as a tool to caption lives, that its limited space format presents the perfect format to caption and to recaption both ones own life, but also the lives, ideas, comments, and now...videos of others.
But what happens when the caption becomes the video, becomes the image? What happens when we replace short spurts of text with short clips of videos, and therefore the way we comment, and even conceive of responses changes. I'm sure this is in part already happening...hell, I've seen it on sites like facebook, and myspace...where someones response to a comment, idea, image, or movie, is a image or movie without text. Barthes, in Image Music Text, discusses the idea that barriers between disciplines are breaking down with the ideas of interdisciplinarity, that put into connection ideas that may not jive entirely with each other, but are being pushed to do something new anyways. He specifically talks about this in reference to the idea of a Text, which, as he points out "poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of its 'social' functions)" (157) I think the same can be said when you put different media together in ways that make conversation rather than just support each other. These texts are being made to speak not as separate functions, but as ideas working within a single kind of language (however disjointed that language might be).
If images, movies, words, all fall under that category of Text, because of their incapability to be only one thing, then they can all work in similar ways in a similar format...like a tweet. The more we try to differentiate, to work towards separation, the more conversations done in this matter becomes difficult to understand and work with. Barthes whole discussion of text is as it being discontinuous, broken apart, while still managing to create connection and create meaning. It, as he puts it, attempts to "abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading" and in this case, the difference between creating and viewing (159). Tweets are a way of captioning captions, and captioning images, and captioning oneself, and captioning everything...they break down the barriers between real life events and the texts that people create out of them; they therefore turn life into text...or maybe even Text (I'm still working out what the distinction actually is).
Ok, I think that's enough of me confusing myself for awhile...I'll probably be posting on this idea again later.
But what happens when the caption becomes the video, becomes the image? What happens when we replace short spurts of text with short clips of videos, and therefore the way we comment, and even conceive of responses changes. I'm sure this is in part already happening...hell, I've seen it on sites like facebook, and myspace...where someones response to a comment, idea, image, or movie, is a image or movie without text. Barthes, in Image Music Text, discusses the idea that barriers between disciplines are breaking down with the ideas of interdisciplinarity, that put into connection ideas that may not jive entirely with each other, but are being pushed to do something new anyways. He specifically talks about this in reference to the idea of a Text, which, as he points out "poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of its 'social' functions)" (157) I think the same can be said when you put different media together in ways that make conversation rather than just support each other. These texts are being made to speak not as separate functions, but as ideas working within a single kind of language (however disjointed that language might be).
If images, movies, words, all fall under that category of Text, because of their incapability to be only one thing, then they can all work in similar ways in a similar format...like a tweet. The more we try to differentiate, to work towards separation, the more conversations done in this matter becomes difficult to understand and work with. Barthes whole discussion of text is as it being discontinuous, broken apart, while still managing to create connection and create meaning. It, as he puts it, attempts to "abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading" and in this case, the difference between creating and viewing (159). Tweets are a way of captioning captions, and captioning images, and captioning oneself, and captioning everything...they break down the barriers between real life events and the texts that people create out of them; they therefore turn life into text...or maybe even Text (I'm still working out what the distinction actually is).
Ok, I think that's enough of me confusing myself for awhile...I'll probably be posting on this idea again later.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Defining Oneself through Technology...through image
A lot of what Roland Barthes discusses in the beginning of his book, Image, Music, Text, is about the way photographs are increasingly designed for particular effect. They are designed in such a way that each part of the image contributes to an overall message, a connotation or a set of connotations developed from the way in which the audience is pushed to perceive the image. The composition of an image, in essence, defines how people take the message.
The interesting thing is, identity of individuals seem to be being developed through pictures, through the interaction of captioned images and composed websites. Social networking sites seem to promote the conception of an individual as much through images, videos, music, etc, as through the persons description of themselves. Facebook, for example, seems to have very little space dedicated to a self description.
What does this mean?
Well, it could mean a lot of things. The most obvious is that our lives are, in one sense, composed of images (each of which is a composition in and of itself, with its own set of connotated meanings). The more interesting thing, I think though, is the connection of these images to captions and mini-messages inserted below them. When people post pictures; they are in essence composing identity not only through the pictures, but also through what they say, and what others say about them. The captions and the comments. These, as much as the pictures themselves, define the experience that the audience has; they define how that person is seen by each successive viewer. As Barthes points out, captions have capabilities to affirm image meanings, but also to “contradict the image so as to produce a compensatory connotation” (27). While he is specifically referring to the way in which images are used in newspaper, technology has advanced, and now these images are plastered up onto the world wide web. They are a collection of images that are not only captioned by the person posting, but by every single person viewing it. This transformational move is powerful and subtle. The caption, the comment, is now a defining nature about what the person is and how they are defined...at least so long as they decide to accept it (another interesting topic). Power of identity, both of the photo and of the person, is placed into the role of the camera and the posted persona...but also most interestingly, into whoever decides to read it and take the time to post to it. Identity forging becomes a mass production; especially the larger the scope of the network that it is being forged in. The brief caption can define, confront, change, ignore, and belittle the image, or even the set of images.
I guess the question then is, how much are images defined by the captions, headlines, and other text around them, and how do these new ways of interacting in social media really form identities. How much can we really say we are defined by our own particular input and how much of it is from the outside.
How much would a single comment at the end of this blog post change the blog post?
How about a hundred....a thousand...a hundred thousand? (Not that I'm really expecting that).
And a question for another time....are tweets just mini-captions, posted about life situations, events, etc.? They seem quite appropriate in format for that.
The interesting thing is, identity of individuals seem to be being developed through pictures, through the interaction of captioned images and composed websites. Social networking sites seem to promote the conception of an individual as much through images, videos, music, etc, as through the persons description of themselves. Facebook, for example, seems to have very little space dedicated to a self description.
What does this mean?
Well, it could mean a lot of things. The most obvious is that our lives are, in one sense, composed of images (each of which is a composition in and of itself, with its own set of connotated meanings). The more interesting thing, I think though, is the connection of these images to captions and mini-messages inserted below them. When people post pictures; they are in essence composing identity not only through the pictures, but also through what they say, and what others say about them. The captions and the comments. These, as much as the pictures themselves, define the experience that the audience has; they define how that person is seen by each successive viewer. As Barthes points out, captions have capabilities to affirm image meanings, but also to “contradict the image so as to produce a compensatory connotation” (27). While he is specifically referring to the way in which images are used in newspaper, technology has advanced, and now these images are plastered up onto the world wide web. They are a collection of images that are not only captioned by the person posting, but by every single person viewing it. This transformational move is powerful and subtle. The caption, the comment, is now a defining nature about what the person is and how they are defined...at least so long as they decide to accept it (another interesting topic). Power of identity, both of the photo and of the person, is placed into the role of the camera and the posted persona...but also most interestingly, into whoever decides to read it and take the time to post to it. Identity forging becomes a mass production; especially the larger the scope of the network that it is being forged in. The brief caption can define, confront, change, ignore, and belittle the image, or even the set of images.
I guess the question then is, how much are images defined by the captions, headlines, and other text around them, and how do these new ways of interacting in social media really form identities. How much can we really say we are defined by our own particular input and how much of it is from the outside.
How much would a single comment at the end of this blog post change the blog post?
How about a hundred....a thousand...a hundred thousand? (Not that I'm really expecting that).
And a question for another time....are tweets just mini-captions, posted about life situations, events, etc.? They seem quite appropriate in format for that.
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