Week 11: Web 2.0
Hardey, "The City in the age of web 2.0"
Although Hardey writes about blogs, noting "[they] sever as a platform for the assertion (or performance) of social identities through the display of experiences, images and connections," this observation could be applied to any Web 2.0 or socialware. This idea of asserting identity through collections of things is almost Benjaminian, mirroring his observation that, in an age of mechanical reproduction, we all identify ourselves through the objects we collect. Although Hardey explicitly disagrees with my Benjaminian interpreation, I think Benjamin is still relevant here (not so much in his interpretation of the city, but in his interpretation of consumerism/art). This mapping turn towards visualizing narrative (one's personal narrative and that of a city's) is interesting, as it displaces the temporal (or adds to it) in favor of the spatial. Hardey wrote that the earliest map mashups were of local property markets, where users could get information about property values. One of the results of the increased accessibiliy to this information is that it's chagned the relationship between buyers/sellers/brokers, putting buyers/sellers in a more powerful position to negotiate deals. Hardey observes that Web 2.0 positions people in such a way that the city is never "strange." I'm wondering to what extent, then, a city can ever be personalized. While it's naive and idealistic to assume that one can ever own a city, I think an important part of getting connected with a space and finding meaning in it is to find one's own personal meaning with a space, and develop that relationship through getting lost, getting found, and discovering the unexpected in the process. Some of this new technology, I think, elides this sort of exploratory experience. Or, if it doesn't elide it, it replaces the materiality of walking through a city with the immateriality of the information. To put it another way, rather than exploring the materiality of the city, I explore the information about the city first. In some ways the information of/about the cityspace begins to supersede the experience of that space (and I allude to Lefebvre's trialectic here). This isn't to ignore the important function that maps always served, bu I do think there's something to take into account when the information about a place seems to become or precede the experience of the place itself.
Jenkins, "Interactive audiences"
There's a lot of optimism in this text. I'm really curious about the optimism regarding the fandom's free knowledge base (p. 140). While I agree that these new forms of knowledge creation/dissemination destabalize traditional power structures, I disagree with implication that this destabilization means that certain voices are no longer silenced. Perhaps voices are no longer silenced because those voices have found other places and forums in which to sound off. This doesn't mean that these voices aren't silenced in one or another context. What I'm trying to write against here is the idea that these fan groups are totally self-organized and suggest that in that self-organization, the groups and group forums will take on a life of their own; perhaps something similar to Barker and Cheney's concertive control, a Foucauldian take on organizational communication. Their qualitative research showed that self-organizing groups tend to be less flexible and demand more accountability from members than other types of organizations.Okay, so later in the essay, Jenkins backs up a little bit and acknowledges, through Baym and MacDonald, that fan communities are not exactly perfect, writing that there is conflict, and that sometimes falese consensus can be reached, thereby silencing dissenting voices. Levy's distinction of four power sources-nomadic mobility, control over territory, ownership over commodities, and mastery over knowledge-seem like they're very applicable to an analysis of mobile technologies, space, and social networks, since these tools are at the intersection of all four of these power sources. "The producers of Xena: Warrior Princess, for example, were fully aware that some fans wanted to read Xena and Gabrielle as lesbian lovers and thus began to consciously wave 'subtext' into the episodes. As Levy explains, 'The recipients of the open work are invited to fill in the blanks, choose among possible meanings, confront the divergences among their interpretations." I think I might be channeling Jordan here (j/k, though you are our fearless self-avowed, elitist, right?), but I am worried that this participatory writing can lead to writing for the lowest commono denominator. Or, perhaps it's not writing for hte lowest common denominator asmuch as it's writing for multiple lower common denominators (because you can presumably self-select into different self-organizing groups). I don't know whether this will be the death of the author or the birth of true fan-culture/interactive audiences, but I'm waiting for something that is entirely fan produced. Can there be such a thing? To take an older form of media, can we imagine what a novel written-by-committee might look like? I doubt the first fan-created <lt>thing</llt> will be a novel, and I have no idea what form it'll take, but I'm really wondering what form it will take.
Jenkins, "Pop cosmopolitanism"
I've been trying to think of when or what might symbolize the start of US fascination with Japanese culture. Obviously, we can probably date a lot of the cultural influences to the economic-political ties that were established post-WW2, but if we're going to look more recently, say at the consumer type of power Jenkins mentions, I'd guess that Nintendo would be a good starting point. Why Nintendo? Well, I like Jenkin's train of thought that Japanese technology exports had something to do with starting this trend, but I don't think that importing Sony TVs in the 70s would necessarily have anything to do with prompting a fascination with Japanese culture. Therefore, I think Nintendo is probably a perfect techno-cultural intersection, because it was both a technological and a cultural export to the US. Along with the technology, we also began importing games that were designed not by American companies but by Japanese companies with names like Konami and Namco Bandai. I point out the names because I can remember how the company name comes up at the start of every game. Because these names aren't familiar to the US player, they remind the player of the origin of these games. Naturally, the foreign developers also developed games based on their own culture. Therefore, I think Nintendo is a perfect example of a techno-cultural export that likely prompted or certainly quickened the US interest in Japanese culture. You know, it's interesting that remediation is such a key concept for studying new media, but we don't exactly have a similar concept for culture. What is remediation when it's applied to culture? I think the US-Japanese-US cultural loop is a great example of this. Let me elaborate a bit. After WW2, US culture had a great influence on Japanese culture (ever hear the term "hypercapitalism")? Many US cultural forms were adapted and transformed in Japan in the post-WW2 era. Now, it seems that those cultural forms, having been changed by / mediate through the Japanese culture, are making there way back to the US. This is akin to remediation as applied to culture. Cool. (Also, I don't mean to suggest that all of the Japanese cultural exports we receive are our own culture remediated back to us. That would be ignorant.)
Jenkins, "Blog this!"
In this piece, Jenkins presciently outlines the democratizing potential of blogs, noting (not in these terms nor so explicitly) that blogs may provide forms of resistance to coprorate media conglomerates by framing and fact-checking stories from these conglomerates.
Fagerjod, "Rhetorical convergence: studying web media"
Fagerjord's description of immediacy and hypermediacy reminds me of Lanham's split between looking at and looking through media. The logic of immediacy hidses the medium to the greatest extent possible (or at least distracts us from the medium, theoretoically allowing us to focus on the represented object. Hypermediacy, in contrast, calls to our attention the medium itself. Fagerjord's most interesting move--for me--comes near the end, when he alludes to the concept of "genre" being very close to his concept of "web media." While the web is certainly a type of distribution medium, how can we distinguish between the forms that are communicated through that distribution medium (such as a podcast) and the genres composed through those media? Is a blog a medium or a genre? Recalling Hayle's observation that new media forces us to look at old media in new ways, I think the web pushes us to reconsider the difference/relationship between genre/medium in whole new ways.