Week 5 - Archive Fever

On to week 5 and this week’s topic is archives again! This week’s blog will have more to do with authority and memory, as well as the cultural and individual theory and practice surrounding this information. Jussi Parikka suggests that archives have always had an interesting aura surrounding them despite being thought of as obsolete and abandoned places, and to some extent, this is true, however, the concept of an archive is changing. Jacques Derrida writes in his piece Archive Fever that different media processes set up different kinds of archives, which often form the basis of cultural activity.
We are able to see archives as a link between memory and experience. Archives allow us to gain both of these through the one piece of information and distribute it through different forms of content and expression. Producers and users (or ‘produsers’ if you will) are able to use archives to both express their experiences and distribute them among different media platforms, allowing this information to feed into each other and flow through other information systems. This is where I believe our designated ‘word of the week’ comes into action, but more of that infotention (or ‘infotension’) stuff later.
Archive fever is able to influence our experience of media, as well as the theory and practice surrounding these topics. Experience depends on the way we deal with these archives, and how they are able to carry our past actions into the present and onto future possibilities. The theory and practice side of archives provides us with the approaches, methods and concepts used by people to link media technologies and techniques back to the archived information. Archives are able to change our conception of the world through theories and practice, and this link between media, theory and culture makes archives one of the three main aspects of publishing. Overall, archives are able to act as a theory and as a technology or technique all at the same time, forming the basis for possible future methods, approaches and practices in the media world.

Infotention – the forms of attentions and distractions that can change our habits, ideas, or even information!

Now, back to my ideas on infotention. Howard Rheingold writes that infotention is the word he has created to describe the particular set of skills needed to find our way online today. He says it is a combination of both attention skills and computer information filters, which I believe is incredibly relevant to online media archives. Take for example my Facebook photo albums, a classic example of the online archive that is able to hold both digital memory and experience. Now while this may be easy for me to upload these photos online, my parents wouldn’t have a clue how to do it. Therefore, you could say that I have the infotention to post an online archive, as I have the necessary skills to carry out the task online, while my parents, although having both cognitive and social skills, lack the technological skill to create this type of archive. Overall, infotention is based around attention and distraction. These forms of thinking are able to influence our habits through media archives, which are often a form of either attention or distraction, depending on how you look at them!
References:
Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Parikka, J. (2013) “Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology”, in Ernst, Wolfgang Digital Memory and the Archive, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 1-22
Rheingold, H. (2009) “Mindful Infotention: Dashboards, Radars, Filters”, SFGate, <http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/09/01/mindful-infotention-dashboards-radars-filters/> [accessed 25/08/2014 ]

Week 4 - Actor Network Theory

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) refers to the relationship between the material and the semiotic and how they come together as a whole. In order to do so, ANT considers the contributions of both human and non-human ‘actants’ to be equal, thus creating a state of generalised symmetry. These actants are described as existing in a network; however, I found it more beneficial to consider these actants as part of a constantly shifting and evolving process that must be performed (delukie, 2009). Once this process stops growing and developing, the individual components can no longer interact and act out their roles, thus causing the entire network to disintegrate.

As with any theory, there has been critical analysis. The main criticism is that intentionality should not be given to non-human actants because that aspect is what distinguishes living beings from inanimate devices. ANT scholar’s response that non-human actants perform agency without intentionality undermines their concept of equal material-semiotic contribution. Sandra Harding in Banks (2011) brings up an interesting argument that through ANT’s equalising concept, social factors such as race, gender and class are considered irrelevant when in fact these qualities are incredibly influential. Thus ANT cannot explain or challenge phenomenon, it merely describes them.

Despite this, ANT is a social theory and research method that has been applied to various sociological fields to encourage new ways of thinking in areas such as politics, history, science and technology. It has also been useful to apply ANT to exploring identity and subjectivity, addiction, feminism, anthropology, economics, health studies and organisational analysis. The material-semiotic approach is highly flexible, therefore allowing various interpretations which allow such widespread application.

In publishing, ANT can be a useful framework for analysing different media, particularly how the relationship between technological advancements and developers has nurtured what publishing is in contemporary society. One example that springs to mind is radio, since it would not be possible for radio content to be published without radio presenters and sound engineers working with recording equipment to transmit messages across airwaves. Another is Twitter, where software developers created a program where individuals could publish short blogs, not expecting that it would evolve into a platform that facilitates debate and social change. The idea could similarly be applied to YouTube, where the creators couldn’t foresee how grassroots media producers could work with video content to establish new ways of information and entertainment dissemination. The possibilities are endless.

References:

‘Actor Network Theory’, Wikipedia, accessed 17 August 2014, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actornetwork_theory>.

Banks, D. (2011), ‘A Brief Summary of Actor-Network Theory’, Cyborgology,

2 November, accessed 17 August 2014, <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/12/02/a-brief-summary-ofactor-network-theory/>.

delukie (2009) ’Actor-Network Theory in Plain English’, online video, Youtube.com, 16 November 2009, accessed 17 August 2014, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2YYxS6D-mI>.

Week 3 - Paywalls

The implementing of paywalls is useful to newspaper companies because it indicates how valued their content is, as audiences who truly want to read their articles will gladly pay for digital or digital and physical subscriptions. Instead of receiving cyclical revenue through advertising space paid for by companies that receive custom from newspaper readers who are encouraged by advertisements in newspapers, newspapers are gradually receiving direct profits from their readers in the form of subscriptions. This indicates a shift in weight of sources of revenue for the news industry.

This is also beneficial for readers as:
- News sites are motivated to increase the quality of their content so target publics are willing to pay for access to articles
- Audiences can distinguish between newspapers with comparatively better content based on the amount of subscribers and the amount of revenue they generate instead of revenue from advertisers

However at the moment, paywalls are not generating maximum potential revenue because they're targeting readers who are loyal to newspapers themselves- businessmen, older generations, and stable households who rely on the paper for their news. Paywalls are not remotely appealing to people with a news reading routine similar to mine: be told of news on social media, follow links on social media to articles that elaborate, and if the news is particularly interesting, we'll read the first three articles that Google provides and accept overlapping information as truth. Our connections on social media represent people with similar situations to ours, for example university students, or topics that interest us, for example anthropology. Therefore any news that pertains to our interest will come to our attention, and our profile on social media will naturally filter out information not immediately important to us- because we care about a particular story, not which company tells it.

Link for Guardian Masterclasses about the need to make magazines and journals appealing. This would be beneficial for newspapers as well as we are a literate culture heavily influenced by visual aesthetics.

The Guardian (2014), Guardian News and Media Limited, London, Accessed 12 August 2014
< http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-masterclasses/the-future-of-digital-magazines-peter-houston-publishing-course?INTCMP=mic_233434 >

WEEK 2 - New publishing platforms

Publishing in its most simple form is the practice of bringing to the attention of the public information that may have previously been unknown. There have been many devices that have facilitated the act of publishing throughout time, progressing from basic facial expressions and proclaiming, to writing and drawing, to printing and recording.

But with the rise of the digital age comes a new and significantly different way in which information can now be shared. Not only has the digitisation of information made information more accessible, but also it has magnified the abundance of and diversifies the scope of publishing. Essentially, today just about anyone can be a publisher. This blog for one is an example of content that I have published. Other online platforms in which I have also taken on the role of the publisher includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

Digitising information has threatened printed material, altering the way in which content is being published today. What once was considered one of the most important inventions, the printing press, is in decline. As Will Self (2014) observed, “Fewer paper books are being sold, newspapers fold, bookshops continue to close, libraries as well.” In today’s society, magazines and newspapers articles are all readily available online for consumption, and almost instantaneously at that. Nothing beats being able to pick and choose which articles to read and which ones to skip – sports articles anyone?

The growing popularity of digital texts, including e-books and audiobooks, sees the waning of the physical book; “It’s never been easier to buy books, read books, or read about books you might want to buy” (Lehrer, 2010). Although I agree that nothing can beat the feel and smell of the pages of a brand new printed book, I can also appreciate that sometimes it is far more convenient and lighter to carry around an e-reader than a physical book. Furthermore with e-readers, we can create networked books which provide a whole new world of opportunities for the publishing industry. As introduced in the Week 1 Lecture, Inkling Habitat is an example of a publishing tool in which digital content can be created. “Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity” (Institute for the Future of the Book). The e-reader is definitely yet another publishing opportunity in which to add to the wealth of knowledge that is already available.

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References

‘Publishing’, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing&gt;.

Self, Will (2014) ‘The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)’, The Guardian, May 2, <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction&gt;.

Lehrer, Jonah (2010) ‘The Future of Reading’, Wired, September 8, <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/the-future-of-reading-2&gt;.

‘Mission Statement’, Institute for the Future of the Book, <http://http://www.futureofthebook.org/mission.html>.