Web 2.0
In "The City in the Age of 2.0," Hardey(2007) discusses how "A new category of inequality has been constructed around a ‘digital divide’ whereby those who are unconnected to the Internet are further socially and economically marginalized" in terms of remapping the city in an age of web 2.0 (p. 867). This reminded me of the question brought up during the week on space/place in terms of what ethical obligations we "owe" the poor or digitally disenfranchised. The more an urban space becomes a hybrid place for the techno-elite, I think the more we need to consider how differently we want the poor in this country to experience life in America or American places. It's not a matter of socialism or a computer for every child, because we already draw the line of equality at the college education, which is not available to all. However, there is something more chilling to me that if hybrid places become more of the norm than the unique exception then the people on the other side of the divide will have a markedly different experience of sense of place (re: the discussion of mashups and tagged locations allowing different information/experience to users who can open the tags.) Also, Hardey (2007) points out in the section on blogs that the photoblog in particular has the ability to create narratives and enables "authors and readers to create and follow both virtual and real paths through the city"(p. 875). This also made me think about how technology holds the capacity to marginalize in storytelling/history if the stories being told in images are being appropriated from places and are being "told" only by a select group. (On a less serious note, did anyone think about GPS mashups in terms of the next logical step in car music where you'd have: "[lyrics] [lyrics] recalculating, keep left, [lyrics]". . .? )
Jenkins, in "Interactive Audience," sets out to describe how three trends in new media have/are changing media consumers' relationships to producers and media objects. In discussing Levy's concept of a "cosmopedia" Jenkins uses the concept of fan groups to advance the idea of non-locality specific, virtual, self-formed communities (Jenkins, 2006, p. 137). I found it particularly interesting that the treatment of fans points out that "Fans became, in John Tulloch's words, a "powerless elite," unable to alter the series content but actively reshaping the reception context through grassroots media production (Jenkins, 2006, p. 138). The discussion of fans, it seemed to me, did reopen up some of our earlier debate of Baudrillard versus Enzensberger in which fans could be said to be "speaking back" in the form of participatory media outlets. However, when it comes to the actual airing/writing/producing of the television episode or series, the network holds power over the "univocal message." I was also interested in the distinction between shared (or common) knowledge and collective intelligence of a body of knowledge. Especially in terms of the example of soap opera fan communities, I was interested in how this might interact with the idea of older forms of collective intelligence in primarily oral cultures.
In "Pop Cosmopolitanism," Jenkins takes a slightly different approach in detailing the idea of global culture and interaction between "corporate convergence" and "grassroots convergence." One small point that I took issues with was this: "Many American children are more familiar with the characters of Pokemon than they are with those from the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson"(Jenkins, 2006, p. 157). I found this to be a slightly stilted analogy in that Hans Christian Anderson stories are no more "American" (originating in Denmark?) than Pokemon. I found in this statement about the ubiquity of global culture that Jenkins was conflating either traditional with American or white with American culture. (For instance, are children more familiar with Pokeman than Dora the Explorer?) Also, I thought that it was an important point that the globalizaiton of culture must reflect other cultures not merely as iconic, but as dynamic/contemporary. Therefore, in the example of Indian culture, Jenkins (2006) says that "Combining classic dance and current club styles, the cultural shows construct Indians as both timeless and contemporary, as both a world away and right in one's own backyard, reflecting the conflicted character of diasporic culture"(p. 163). In discussing this Jenkins(2006) questions whether "the ability to dance to the Other's music lead to any real appreciation of the Other's social condition or political perspective"(p. 164). This was particularly important to me because I think there is a great danger while in trying to escape parochialism to blindly put up another culture's iconic artifacts without entertaining the differences between iconic culture and contemporary culture and in essence doom that cultural understanding to a fixed, particular, and possibly very small identification of that culture only in the past.
Jenkins, in "Blog this," described the role/status of bloggers as the hunters of the information age. Similar to my earlier comment, in this short piece I believe that Jenkins re-affirms the positioning of corporate versus consumer producers in a fashion similar to Baudrillard vs Enzensberger. Jenkins states that: "Ultimately, our media future could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and these grassroots intermediaries"(Jenkins, 2006, p. 180). In this piece Jenkins concludes with a call to arms of sorts that "grassroots intermediaries may have a moment to redefine the public perception of new media and to expand their influence"(p. 181).
Finally, in "Rhetorical Convergence," Fagerjord looks at the idea of convergence of multiple modes of composition and media genres in looking at how a website about a triple murder employs methods typical of the radio, television, and newspapers. In looking at convergence, Fagerjord also looks at Bolter and Grusin's definitions of remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy to develop a theory of composing in different media. The two logics are defined such that immediacy is the transparent quality of a representation and hypermediacy is the style which calls attention to itself (Fagerjord, 2003, p. 303). I thought that the discussion of the presentation of the Triple Murder was very interesting as it represented a highly modular "object." Unlike considering video, text, and sound working together in unity throughout the text, I thought one of the most important points here was the idea that an object or piece of web"writing?" could employ different strategies, conventions, and presentations in a much more fractured way. When I think of multimodal composition I often think of it from a pedagogical standpoint in English 101 where the goal is to get students to use text, images, and (to a lesser degree) sound, to work together simultaneously. However, in presenting a piece of multimedia in which there is text, interactive (computer game-like) maps, sound bytes, video clips, etc. all working together asynchronously, there is a very different rhetoric at work. Often we are not asked so much to integrate these multimodal aspects simultaneously but to synthesize the information over a variety of media perspectives, similar to the presentation in VG net. I was interested in what this dis-unity, media diversity, or imperfect convergence does in terms of contributing to unity in perspectives of the object as a whole. It was also interesting in Fagerjord's equation(p. 315) that we now have to consider media conventions and traditions, audience's use of media and social setting in constructing a work.