Facebook January 10, 2008

What blog about creative audiences could be complete without a mention of Facebook, the website that is rapidly eroding all my free time and what every student seems to find beyond captivating as soon as an essay is due in?! 

Facebook is now the second largest social networking page, still eclipsed by MySpace which has nearly three times as many members but Facebook is ‘one of the fastest-growing and best-known sites on the Internet today’ and it is thought to be going from strength to strength with the designer Mark Zuckerberg now allowing companies to start piling their wares on the site without charging.  Facebook, it seems has now got a huge following with three-quarters of it’s members logging on at least once a day and spending 24 minutes on there with average users logging on up to six times a day (nytimes).  Facebook intends to expand itself allowing companies to place adverts and programmes on it, hoping to cement its place as the centre of its user’s online browsing experience. 

However, why Facebook?  Facebook does not allow its users the same freedoms that some social network sites do such as the easy customization on MySpace.  Facebook has a strict format and all members profiles look the same with only the personal details being able to be altered and edited by its users.  Websites such as Second Life allow their members to create whole online personalities with other members only being able to see their online avatars which can have as little or as much similarity to their actual selves as they wish.  It would be feasible to suggest that whilst Second Life can offer a strong sense of freedom, a chance to create a totally new persona Facebook simply allows us to confirm our realistic personality.  This is not to say that Facebook does not offer any creative freedom for its users and does not allow them to present whatever image of themselves they wish as users still have the choice of what they put on their profile, which applications they use, what images they use and what information they put online about themselves. 

Facebook and other social networking websites tend to be thought of as new global communities however with Facebook you must accept people as your friend in order for them to see your profile, unless you already are categorized as in the same network e.g. place of study for students.  Therefore, it is quite unlikely that on Facebook members will make friends with people from all over the world unless they already know the people from another situation.  Facebook offers it’s members a chance to truly interact with the technology, and this in turn has made many users expect more from their accounts, for example, the majority of people I know who changed from MySpace to Facebook did so because of Facebook’s unlimited photo storage for members, small default details like the status applications and the ever growing array of applications such as Flickr film reviewing software.

Facebook is now well known for it’s obsessive users and even political parties such as the Liberal Democrats are using the site in order to reach younger people, people they would not normally be able to contact and lets these students and workers be able to contact politician’s in a far more personal way than previously before. 

However, on the negative side, Facebook members are starting to be watched raising concerns about invasion of privacy.  The properties of the site mean that events can be advertised and promoted through groups of friends and wardens at universities and colleges have started to use this information to check on their students and their actions.  For example, recently students at Oxford University were told by their union to ensure they had limited profiles so that their dons could not access their details such as pictures as these pictures were being viewed and then handed to the police regarding vandalism and trouble making.  Other university lecturers have started checking their student’s profiles, ensuring that when students say they are ill they really are and not simply feeling the after effects of a night out- information simply found by looking at the status function and pictures; both assessable as long as both parties are members of the same network. 

However, students are not the only people who use Facebook and many companies have started to ban Facebook and other social networking sites as seeing them as a huge drain on their employees time with it been estimated that 233 million hours a month are being wasted by workers on sites such as Facebook.Still, no matter how interesting logging into Facebook seems and reading your news feed which is dedicated to keeping you up to date which what changes have recently been made to your friends accounts, emerging research is showing that no matter how many friends people tend to have on these websites, true close friends tend to be the same as they would have in the real world.  This seems to be very true, as the vast majority of the people I talk to and my friends talk to via Facebook are people we see and contact regularly anyway.  

Perhaps it is not fair to say that Facebook creates a new social network for it’s users but simply gives them another way in which to contact their existing friends.It is worth remembering though that Facebook will certainly not be the end and cutting edge of social network websites for long; websites such as dolppr.com been seen as the future of staying in contact with friends over vast distances.  

    http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6938807.stm 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/24/facebook.socialnetworking 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6989100.stm 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6902333.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/technology/25social.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 

The Threat Of Online Misinformation and Misunderstanding January 10, 2008

In the early hours of this morning I was listening to the ‘Most Annoying Celebrities Of 2007’ television programme as purely background noise whilst I was reading the end of a book I got for Christmas which I was totally gripped by.  As I finished my book the next celebrity that was on the programme was Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical and they were discussing her nude pictures scandal.  Perez Hilton was talking about it and branded it a blatant publicity stunt and pointed out that her publicity department could have easily denied her responsibility and her actions but they confirmed it was her in the pictures, obviously trying to lose her sweet image from High School Musical.  I found this quite interesting anyway as I had already been shown the pictures by my flat mate and we had found the whole thing very amusing but what struck me as more interesting is that, on reflection, I had never questioned if these pictures were actually her or not or why they had been released into the public domain. 

As the internet is such a huge information portal it is often hard to find any objectivity online.  We have information on any given topic at our finger tips but rarely do we consider why it is there or what it is offering us. In his book ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’ Neil Postman discusses Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in comparison to George Orwell’s famous ‘1984’.  Orwell talks of an external power that oppresses us whereas Huxley feared a society where we invite so much information into our lives that we become our own censors and lose our sense of self like the victims of Orwell’s Big Brother.  Huxley’s vision seems to be coming more and more prominent in our society that has nearly all the information in the world on the computer in their front room but instead they choose merely to check their emails and Facebook and then log back off. 

Through the internet we have the potential to be truly active audiences, writing blogs, creating films, broadcasting our views but the vast majority of us are not harnessing the powers we now have access to.  We all should have freedom of speech online and we can create a ‘global village’ where we all care and support each other, creating a true public sphere where we can freely discuss the problems in the world with each other but instead we are still a passive audience in a large respect.  With the introduction to the internet we quickly became swamped with a choice of information sources and new uses of this technology that offer so much that many of us simply choose the security of our favourite websites without venturing any further.  Rarely do we question if we are being manipulated and how our sense of self, the politics we understand and the community we live in being corrupted by our online experiences.  Many of us have a strong sense of fatigue with the world, a world which seems to be growing in its visibility everyday with more and more people logging on to the internet and so we stick with what and who we know. 

Websites such as Wikipedia allow us to learn with the rest of the world in a huge mixing pot of knowledge but in reality would we instantly believe what someone in the street told us about a particular topic or would we seek far further proof whilst many people believe the information on Wikipedia with little questioning.  Wikipedia itself warns against ‘significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism’ which it acknowledges can be found on its pages however quite a lot of this information is not explicitly incorrect and so could easily be mistaken for truth.  With Wikipedia specifically most people know not to automatically believe it but through other far more repuatable websites such as The Guardian online there is now a prolifence of blogs from their journalists which many people will not think to question the objectivity of the work whilst the pieces will tend to be very personal and subsquently very subjective. 

Surely this new subjectivity is all part of our online identities but it is so important to question what we read, like we should in the more traditional forms of media that we are exposed to.  We must remember that everyone online is not a professional and that they may be trying to corrupt us in some way and online there are not the same legal guidelines to adhere to as there is through more traditional methods of media such as broadcasting and print media.     

Sources  Postman, N. (1987) Amusing Ourselves To Death.  Methuen Publishing Limited, London.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

Online Television January 10, 2008

Recently BBC have finally launched their iPlayer.  The iPlayer like it’s forerunner 4OD formally allow the viewers to watch television programmes online, normally for free, creating a more legal, less copyright-nightmare version than the hugely popular YouTube where most programmes are already available.  This practice is being heralded as the future of television at the moment with Bill Gates famously stating that soon we will laugh at television, but what does this tell us about the viewing public now?

Constantly in the media we are being told we are too busy, we are being reminded of our hectic lifestyles with adverts such as moneysupermarket.co.uk which vows to save you time by comparing all the insurance quotes for you instantaneously.  BBC have spent millions of their annual budget ensuring their transfer to the internet and ensuring their sites continue to provide the amount of information that their television channel traditionally did, being the centre of the viewing public’s life. 

Online we are generally thought to be more active audiences as we have to select what we would like to view, we have to choose a website to look at rather than a selection being offered to us like they are on television.  This allows us to fulfill our needs as an audience and watch and research whatever actually interests us rather than what the channels are prepared to provide us with information on.  For as long as there has been television there has been huge fears that television was simply eroding our powers as an audience and turning us into drones whose lives are run through the box in the corner of the room.  Now it would seem that we are being offered the chance to fully break free, still allowed to watch the programmes we enjoy but when we want to see them, bringing us closer to being an active consumer of the television rather than just sitting all night watching what is being presented to us; however the act of watching television is essentially a passive one.  We simply absorb what is being presented to us but over time it seems we are being asked for our feedback more through online forums and discussion boards yet at the end of the day this does not change the passivity of the programme watching itself. 

With this change into streaming on demand however it is fair to expect changes in the way that television is publicised and advertised.  With less people merely tuning into the television to see what is on television channels are going to have to push their programmes across other media so that we will see the adverts for programming traditionally were only on television in between programmes will now be spread throughout the internet and print media.  Through this new means of audience consumption we are experiencing a new way of broadcasting and this way seems to be far more individual than other methods contrasting the image of a family all sat around on a night watching television with the lone viewer logging on to their computer and watching their favourite programme this way.  Through this kind of technology we are not all becoming members of a global village but instead are withdrawing further into ourselves.  Just by the means of using a computer it is difficult to interact with others as more than one person using a computer is often irritating to watch as we are used to being in control of the technology ourselves and not eager to share the access to the information with others; the act of being sat at a laptop is instantly personal as it is visually very hard for more than one person to view the screen at the same time. 

Could this kind of broadcasting bring about the gradual erosion of the public sphere that we are used to discussing television casually on a daily basis?  This creates a diffused audience with people constantly being aware of what they are seeing and discussing it with their friends and family but if we are no longer watching the same programmes then surely we lose this interaction which most of the time is just comments but often can provoke deep discussions about all different kinds of issues including politics and way we perceive the rest of the world. Through the introduction to these kind of online streams we will be splinting the vast mass media audience into far more fragmented and cult audiences who have the power to consume television in a way that they have not had the power to before, with most of the control leaving the hands of the television schedulers. 

This, it seems, is a new dawn for television but sometimes it is nice to have the familiarity of television with everyone sat around merely absorbing the whatever programme we have been told to watch rather than bothering to choose what to watch in an ever expanding catalogue of choice, the way I see it it is not quicker or faster to watch just more convenient for us in some regards but there is the tradeoff for as we can watch it anywhere at any time we have to find it first and download it now, still absorbing more of our time; which if the media is to believed we simply do not have the time to do anymore. 

Fan communities and forums January 10, 2008

For Alan’s module Media Futures and Cyber Cultures our group looked into fan culture but I didn’t get to research too deeply into fan fiction which struck me as fascinating so I thought I’d use some of the information I learnt into this blog entry. 

There are few groups of people who are more active as an audience than fan communities however these groups are all portrayed cynically as ‘sad’ and ‘strange’ people throughout the media.  For this creative audience module it seems that there is no audience that is as creative as these fan communities. 

Fan fiction is nothing new, it has been created for years, rising to prominence using characters from the 1970s science fiction television programmes such as Star Trek and writers would create different adventures, romantic situations and change the principle characters that they focused on; these stories would then be published in fanzines and circulated amongst fans.  However, with the internet there has been an explosion in this practice with nearly every television programme, film and book being written about somewhere online. 

Through the internet it seems that the practice is no longer reserved for ‘obsessive’ fans but now anyone with access to a computer can write and publish their work online.  Traditionally most fan fiction focuses on work of fantasy or science fiction such as Star Trek or the explosion of Harry Potter fan fiction however now all genres are being represented.  Fan fiction is often written by young women and often changes the original storylines of the set text in one or more of the following ways; they expand the timeline (taking the characters either back in time or into the future), they re-focalise (focus on a traditional secondary character), they try and view things from the villain’s point of view so they morally-realign themselves and change the location and situation of the characters or even add themselves into the storyline.  There is a growing field of genre shifting and cross-overs which involves characters from one programme meeting characters from another.  But from day one in fan fiction the vast majority of fiction has revolved around emotional intensification so they expand on the relationships between the characters and also the eroticization of characters.   Some see this kind of writing as ‘a new nonconformist form of female sexual expression’ (bbc.co.uk/magazine) and perhaps if nothing else this practice allows women to form a stronger idea of their own sexual identity. 

 FanFiction.Net is the most comphrensive collection of fan fiction online with Harry Potter alone having 337546 entries with stories being added all the time the it is hard to estimate a true number of stories available.  So what does fan fiction offer its writers?  For many it is a way in which to practice and hone their writing techniques and gain feedback from their peers, both on their writing style and the content of their stories.  But fan fiction works on far deeper level than this as well, fan fiction allows the audience to challenge what they are being presented with.  A lot of fan fiction occurs when readers or viewers are disappointed by what is produced for them and so they make up their own version of events.  One writer said “Sometimes it is a case of taking something that you love and making it better and fixing it.” (bbc.co.uk/technology).

The majority of audiences are passive and as a passive audience we are continuously being manipulated when reading a text in order to associate with certain characters and how to understand the situations we are being presented with.  Writers of fan fiction often reject this manipulation and refuse the dominant ideology that is implicitly held within the text.  For example, within Harry Potter the dominant ideology presented is that of heterosexuality, friendship being all important and a strong sense of morals but in the fan fiction the writers often choose change these features, freeing Harry and instead the character often faces homosexual feelings (with a variety of characters) and severe lapses in his moral judgments. 

Often in fan fiction there is a re-focalisation with the secondary characters taking prominence and this normally originates from when the writer finds it easier or more interesting to put themselves in that position, this allows for different ethnic groups or genders to be portrayed as positively as the dominant characters are portrayed.  This can help people develop a stronger sense of identity, ensuring that themselves are represented somewhere even if not through the traditional media, such as La Guera who started writing Harry Potter stories focusing on a character with her disabilities, using the technology to help audiences understand her condition whilst still writing about her favourite characters.  (bbc.co.uk/ouch).

Alongside the actual writing itself there are many communities of fans who discuss their passions online too which culminates in fan fiction and this allows groups of fans to interact together.  This sense of community is surely part of what makes the internet such a social tool. Through fan forums and discussion sites people can now post their theories about their favourite text, such as the underlying messages.  These can work similar to a public sphere with all people using a username and so they can say what they want without fear of being judged by external signifiers such as age and gender.  However, these areas are not totally perfect as often the fan are rated in some way by how many posts they have made and this can give the forums an inequality.  However, these forums do not necessarily simply discuss the seemingly irrelevant topics about the stories but they can prompt discussions that are relevant to the greater public, such as discussions about politics and images of identity in the media.   

Perhaps, soon it will be more likely for fans to have more and more input into their favourite texts at the level of initial creation with authors such as J.K. Rowling already noting the importance of fan fiction as a means of expression.  Perhaps creators will look at these forums in order to gain a truer sense of what their fans would really like to see and finally these previously under-represented demographics may start to be provided for like the dominant demographics already are.  And maybe then fans will be seen as the true creators and responders that they are rather than merely ‘geeks’. 

Sources: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A632062 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3188813.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/closeup/harrypotter.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3753001.stm 

Response to lecture: the loving exchange of text messages. January 10, 2008

Me and my boyfriend Tom have being going out nearly two years.  We met on the first day of university and became friends and we started going out in December 2005.  What is the most important thing in our relationship? It is our mobile phones. 

The vast majority of our relationship has been conducted through our mobile phones, despite living only five minutes away from each other, it is 2pm and I have spoken to him on the phone twice today already.  Most of the time our messages are simple messages where we discuss when we will meet up and see each other but I think these themselves are important.  The ability to text each other at any time means that we can be in touch even when physically we can’t.  I like it when he texts me during the day simply asking how my day is.  It proves that he is thinking of me and I text him checking he’s ok too.  We tend to exchange at least 6 messages everyday; to know that someone is caring for you even when they are far apart it very touching. 

Without doing the maths me and Tom having dating for about 700 days now.  Out of those days there have only been about 20 when we haven’t been in touch at all.  Tom is from Essex and I’m from Hull so during university holidays we go home and our phones become our means of communicating.  Those messages keep our relationship going despite the different things we’re doing.  The hardest days in our relationship were the ten days he was in Las Vegas over the summer as he couldn’t use his phone and we had no contact, I missed him so much; it made me realize that by being in constant contact with him is one of the best ways for me to keep my healthy distain for him, I was hysterical when I finally spoke to him and it almost gave him some power in our relationship! 

Am I over romanticizing our fairly bland text exchanges? Maybe as in the olden days we would have had to sit and write each other long letters and little memos that we would have had to wait for and cherish. For a start Tom is dyslexic so that might be a bit hard for him to write me a letter in the style of Jane Austen but at the same time who actually can say that pastural imagery and words of that kind of nature are more important than those simple words in a text message, the thought and the meaning behind them is similar.  A few times we have written each other long letters declaring our devotion for the other which of course meant a lot but that kind of romance on a daily basis would end up just like our text messages some would mean more than others. 

Text messages are without a doubt a language and writing within their own right.  Their codes and conventions mean different things to the people exchanging them.  Our exchanges have several codes within them, for example we always finish our messages with three xxx’s.  This is our customary finish but if one of us omit these then we know the other is REALLY angry and upset.  Like a lot of things in life these little subtle displays are most notable when they’re suddenly not there.  In my day to day life I don’t think he is necessarily the most romantic man for sending me a message to ask how my lecture went but when he doesn’t that’s when I notice how much they mean to me.  

Something else that text messaging give us is a space for discussion.  In some ways through text messaging we can discuss issues in a way similar to people in a public sphere.  We both become equal and after an argument or discussion when one of us has walked off it is far easier for us to text rather but the text message stays there ready to be read when you’re calm enough to and the instantaneous properties of text messaging mean that you can talk through the problem but both sides get to put their side across because unlike talking face to face you can’t interrupt someone when they’re texting by talking over them.  It is a lot more democratic way to solve disagreements and raises the importance of rational discussion like Habermas orginially labelled as key to theories of public spheres as we try to overcome our problems rather than simply trying to win the argument.  

So our relationship may not be totally focused on face to face interaction but the constant contact between us allows us to stay up to date with the others actions and are easily able to plan our next meeting.  Like a love letter our messages are quite private, with our nicknames etc for each other being equally sacred.  At the end of the day the Mr Darcy’s in Bronte novels wrote ‘I love you’ and Tom says ‘I love you’ to my face then why just because it is written on a text message would it mean less?  I’m quite happy with a message every night we spend apart saying ‘I’m going to bed now, see you tomorrow, love you xxx’- simple but effective. 

Not that I’m saying he’s simple obviously.

Response to ‘The Machine Stops’. January 10, 2008

In my house we have no gas, only electricity which runs off an electricity meter.  Most of the time this doesn’t make any real difference to our lives, we just have to remember to check how much money we have left and keep ourselves in the black, but when our electricity suddenly turns off it is a very strange sensation. 

E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ opens describing a machine that controls the world, that everyone within it is in awe of it and never think to question the power it holds over their existence.  At the end of the short story the machine stops and no-one notices or can do anything to stop it as it is too late.   This story seems to hold a strong resonance for the way that our lives has gradually but definitely become controlled by our reliance on electricity as a connection to the media.  In the story when the machine finally stops the whole world has to grind to a halt because there is no way for people to communicate as they have all become so isolated and communicating only through the machine.  Once the machine stops there is no way for the people to know what is happening and they have to try and survive using their own instincts and for a very short period of time they reconnect to each other and work together. 

When the electricity in our house unexpectedly turns off we are all suddenly stopped doing whatever we are doing because with three girls in our house we use huge amounts of electricity.  At any one time there is normally at least two different music systems playing, there is always at least one computer running and normally there is a television playing.  On a typical evening we all retire to our individual rooms, all with our own heating and lighting and spend our evenings watching television/films and playing on our computers but once the electricity turns off we are forced to commune on the landing and argue about who is going to go and put money on the meter; the most important thing is regaining our connection to the outside world.  It is amazing how much electricity we use once we are deprived of it and we normally go together as we simply do not have anything else to do, no television, no internet, no music and not even any lighting to read a book.  Perhaps we should use this time to bond, to talk but we race to reconnect ourselves to the outside world. 

The worst thing is when we wake up in the morning and it has gone off overnight as there is a sudden panic, a wave of fear wondering what we are missing from the outside world as we all tend to turn our televisions and internet on in the morning.   In ‘The Machine Stops’ the moment that Vashti realises that the machine has lost it’s power is when she hears silence for the first time, she’d always been ‘surrounded by the steady hum’ and in our society it seems that we all live in a system with a constant background noise.  There is always some music playing, always a television playing, always the internet on and the whirring of technology.  The last time the electricity went off in the early hours of the morning I actually woke up straight away even though there is no alarm or anything but perhaps I simply subconsciously noticed no background noise of the technology that resides around my bed.  Instantly I put on the emergency electricity and went happily back to sleep, safe in the knowledge that there would be some electricity for me to have a shower and check my emails before I went to work the next morning. 

The whole world relies on a vast network of systems which are all run off electricity and through these networks we learn all that we need to know about the world and we gain nearly all our entertainment through the media and it often makes me wonder what would happen if the whole world suddenly run out of electricity and we had to make do without.  I’m sure that we could manage without all this technology if necessary as our ancestors have but perhaps the question is not what we as human beings can withstand but what we would be willing to manage without.  I’m sure that if had no electricity and no media then we would all revert to a primitive state, following whatever signs of life we can and fighting for the return of our way of life, a return to the machine that currently controls us. 

Testing…Testing January 10, 2008

Ok, here we go, I’ve finally found the account that I set up all those weeks ago and now I’m going to leave the relative safety of writing on MicrosoftWord, so please comment etc.

xxx