Week 3's blog
Here's my morning routine: Alarm on my iPhone rings, I snooze. It rings again, I wake up. I put on my glasses, and laying on the bed, I check my iPhone for notifications, then read the news for about 30 minutes. No matter how busting I am every morning, there's just something about my phone that keeps my hands and legs nailed to my bed until I've had enough of news feeds every morning. The media has never been so interactive, responsive and addictive. The machinic assemblage and convergence of previously distinct media platforms into a whole new media form has led us to an unprecedented stage of evolution, where our 'machinic ecology’ - the combination of technology, techniques and technical systems - has been transformed.
Have you ever taken a look into our lives, and wondered how much of the part of our lives are being intruded by these instantaneous technologies? It is true that with the instant news updates and online communications, we have enjoyed easy and immediate access to the world. However, at the same time, how much of our user data and our personal details are given away in the World Wide Web? Think about the social chatting application Whatsapp. Not only does it give away our user data, it also allows our private conversations to be read and intercepted by anyone on the same WiFi network due to an insufficient encryption system. What about our beloved search engine giant Google? Google Now is a new technology supported by recent Android phones, which allows Google to give people information or advertisement they might need, without them even asking for it. Google knows where you are and where you are going through your phone, about your appointments through GMail and the calendar, your interests through your searches and much more. Using all of this information, "Google Now" can alert users to leave earlier for their appointment if there is traffic on the users' usual route. Is that convenient? Absolutely. But for me it is more of scary than convenient! These technologies are the media of the epoch that define the essence of our society and have vastly altered our media ecology. The term 'media ecology', as Neil Postman (1980) describes it, it is about how media technologies create our actions, gives people roles to carry out, and makes us play this role. In simplistic terms, media ecology delves into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival (Media Ecology Association 2009).
In this day and age, we all crave for the latest updates of the news. For instance, people prefer to consume stimulating images of natural disasters taken by citizen journalists with first-hand experience, instead of the pictures taken by the news crew which arrived the area two hours later the incident. There is a blur between the division of consumer and producer when all citizens can produce, share and comment in a click away. We all have become 'part time journalists', as Milissa Deitz (2010) once said, there is an 'intertwined and complex relationships between the journalists, accidental journalists, non-journalists, celebrities, bloggers and the general public'. An example is a video below (included in the news report clip), where a racist attack against two Asian tourists on a Sydney bus was recorded and uploaded by one of the passengers immediately after the incident (Ten News Sydney, 2013). It is this kind of immediacy and spontaneity in information that occupies our mediated communications.
'Technology has advanced to a point where it no longer needs us to make things happen, and I can safely assert that the roles have flipped: – we are now the ones who need this technology in order to operate and to function properly' (Postman 1980).
Indeed, such shift in the contemporary media ecology has serious implications. Instead of the effect of 'centralising and hierarchical media which privileges economic and social elites’s perspective on public discourse' in the television era, we now have an illusion of autonomy in producing and spreading information that exposes wrongdoings and secrets of the government (think whistleblower WikiLeaks) (Taffel 2008). It is undeniable that these technologies have create huge convenience in every aspect of our lives, but at the same time, we allow them to intrude into our private lives, closer and closer, inch by inch. Other concerns of these technologies's impacts include the increase of mental health disorders and stress related disorder, just to name a few (Taffel 2008).
Within the ‘media ecology’, there are information and technology which connect, disconnect and reconnect. The media can be seen as an environment and composed of living organisms and interconnected networks existing at the scales of mind, society and the environment which form an ecosystem, according to Gregory Bateson (2000). Even though there might be some scathing consequences of the new technologies, we can always find 'the same nagging paradox' (Taffel 2008), in which the continuous development of technologies can potentially resolve some dominant ecological issues, yet with an inability to constitute subjective formations to take hold of the specific resources to make them work.
A good way to put this is, “changing changes” (Massumi 2002). Let's all just wait and see what will happen next in our beautiful word of media after Google Glasses, Facebook and Whatsapp.
References:
Bateson, G. 2000, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 2nd ed, University Of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Massumi, B. 2002, A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (eds), Routledge, London/New York.
Media Ecology Association 2009, 'What is Media Ecology?', Media Ecology Association, Washington, accessed 28 March 2013, <http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/>.
Postman, N. 1980, 'The Reformed English Curriculum' in Eurich, A. C. (eds), High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, Pitman Pub. Corp, New York.
Taffel, S. 2008, 'The Three Ecologies – Felix Guattari', Media Ecology and Digital Activism, weblog accessed 28 March 2013, <http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/the-three-ecologies-felix-guattari/>.
Ten News Sydney 2013, 'Racist attack on Sydney Bus - 2/4/2013', Sydney, online video, accessed 28 March 2013, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=134SMR8DIlo>.
Blog word: Machinic (given in lecture 2, in preparation for the second tutorial in week 3)
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