Interesting points
Forms of interactivity: the disappearance of the audience
- this idea that new media is interactive where as old media was active => the capacity to “change the flow and presentation of the material itself” (pg. 13)
- Interesting that they draw on the idea of interactivity as a term which used to be more specifically about interpersonal or ecological relationality and that new media has taken the term to try and return to these conceits (pg.14)
- New media is “modelled on the providing the possibility of exchange and interplay” (pg. 15)
- They also make the point that now interactivity has transformed into a word that is now understood as being about technology
- Control vs freedom
- This idea that interactivity in computing terms is about integrating the person with the objectives of the system
- Surveillance
- Adaption to technology
- We are encouraged to think of ourselves as being in the media and this can increase the level of control the system has over us
- We can also become the content / actors => we become commodities
- There is also productive empowerment through choice and inclusion
- This idea that interactivity in computing terms is about integrating the person with the objectives of the system
The technological apparatus of new media cultures
- Points to Baudrillard: idea of “the simulacrum is a study of the implications of the media form, where reality is replaced by an elaborate construction of reality that he labels hyper-reality” (pg. 32)
- There is also critique of this thinking as not capturing “the lived cultural condition of new media” (pg. 32)
- Also ref. postmodernism – fractured identities, absence of grand narratives
- “the digital world produces us as technological subjects”… (pg. 33)
- New media has made “work ubiquitous and possible in every location imaginable for information workers” (pg. 41)
Playing game cultures: Electronic Games
- Interesting idea that electronic games have contributed to the blurring between work and play
Reflections
- I am surprised at a book that is 20 years old still remains relevant and that what was then referred to ‘new media’ can still be thought of using theories that made sense then
- In particular thinking about the way that control / surveillance have only increased over time and probably because of the melding of media production and social media.
- There are bits of the book that have naturally aged – like the chapters on the internet and t.v.
- The book is written as a way for cultural studies to think about how to work with ‘new media’
- I think this quotation from the conclusion is very interesting:
- “The terrain of popular culture remains, as Stuart Hall intoned almost a quarter-century ago, a site for contestation and struggle over meaning; however, the way that popular culture is made and enjoyed through the forms of new media has shifted and this demands a similar movement in how we analyse this cultural terrain … there is a different ‘structure of feeling’ in contemporary culture because the cultures of new media have to a degree broken down the dialectical dichotomy of production and consumption or, in communication terms, the hierarchal structures of sends and receivers.” (pg. 103)
- What I will take forward is the invitation to think critically about the form, content and implications of the things I am producing using ‘new media’ – trying to hold part of my thinking outside of the system of technological apparatuses
- In my project I think this means trying to also think about bodies and non-technological experiences as being important. Trying not to be seduced or numbed to the body’s relationship to technology – trying not to work in service of technology but thinking of how the technology can fit with the body…
Reference
P David Marshall (2004). New media cultures. London: Arnold.
