Contemporary Culture

Contemporary culture refers to the period of time that is current. Contemporary culture to an individual may refer to anything that has happened during their time. It includes the social, political and the economical climate. What people are engaging in today and the values they have today all relate to the contemporary culture. This doesn’t have to reflect on the technology or the social media in society or anything involved with post digital. It can refer to anything that is current and is happening now. Post digital and technology are two examples of what is current and what can refer to contemporary culture. Post digital is an example as it is what the social is engaging in today and what is new and what is being invented daily.

Nicholas Negroponte Ideas

Nicholas Negroponte is a Greek American architect best known as the founder of Messachetts institute of technologies media lab. I created an essay describing what his ideas of post digital culture are and how it helps us to understand contemporary culture. His ideas have a huge impact on post digital as he argues if post digital will come to an end or if its just the beginning. Negroponte believed, and was convinced that Post digital will come to an end. This is because technology has been injected into people’s minds and took over human society. Negroponte, nevertheless understood that whilst digital technology was busy disrupting every facet of human life, it would soon become so banal as to disappear. Nicholas stated, ‘Computers as we know them today will a) be boring, and b) disappear into things that are first and foremost something else’.

Hacker Culture: Will Wikileaks and/or the Geeks Inherit the Earth?

This blog post is going to show how Digital technology have impacted upon our concepts of contemporary culture. In September 1938 PM Neville Chamberlain made a speech concerning the Munich Agreement. Less than a year after the agreement Europe was plunged into World War II. Wikileaks Wikilieaks is an online international organisation which publishes information and classified media. Julian Assange was one of the early members of the WikiLeaks staff and is credited as the website's founder.   There were many reports that a government inquiry prompted us to not serve Wikileaks any longer because its not accurate. There was also a large number of attacks but they were successfully defended. It wasnt following the 'Human Rights' as it was putting people in jeapoardy. Documents that were relased in Wikileaks that were published could have been carefully redacted in a way which wasnt putting innocent people in danger. Will the geeks inherit? A 'geek' is quite a stereotypical word. It is known to be a person wearing glasses and who is very smart and is good with technology and gadgets. It can also be referred as, A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept. The InnerGeek Website challenges this dismissive definition and argues that that a geek “is a person who is talented in an area outside the boundaries of social normality.”

Digital Media Systems: Paratexts Franchises, Fandom etc.

This blog post is going to focus on how digital media have impacted upon our concepts of the media text. Media theorists have recognized that our understanding a particular text is based on its relationships to other texts. Genre and Genre conventions These involve a close relationship through concepts of producer, IPR, medium, and audience. Paratexts It involves a close relationship through marketing and other non- narrative material called 'Paratexts'. Paratexts take a text and 'surround it and extend it'. -Ownership and Control: Paratextual Analysis Paratexts surround, shape, support and provide contexts for texts'. They may change the meaning of texts, it enhances meaning and provide sedimated meanings. There are different forms of paratexts, such as Digital Paratext. . The Gameboy 'Pokemon is an example. It has a beginning and an end but it repeats, it doesnt mean the game is necessarily over. - This is a closed product the credits keep rolling. An Open product or paratext It involves story rights, story franchise, merchandising and fandom. Alternate Reality Gaming This is not really a game. ARG players are characterised by a willingness to seek out new challenges across the world wide web and beyond, it is to find anagrams in names, coded IP addresses in numbers, and to theorize about the ARG with a wider community on a forum. Gamification It involves applying game design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging.

Digital Politics

Digital Politics & Power: The Dream of Democracy -Representative Democracy -Voting & party manifestos -Constitutions -Deliberative Democracy The Myths Of Internet We are on the verge of a new political era of computer-mediated democracy. Computer Activism -Activists set up computer system as community resource in Berkley California. The personal computer was developed by hobbyists. The first micro computer, the 'Altair sold in kit form. -Extreme utopiarism -Collective intelligence -Similar to Hobermass public sphere A Declaration Of Independence 'In our world, whatever human mind may create can be re produced and distributed infinitely at no cost' So why were the digital media greeted (initially) with such enthusiasm? Why are the media considered to be so important to democratic politics? The printing press as an agent of a change? Einstein notes in her synopsis to her book that aims to: -Describe 'The relationship between communications shift and other developments conventionally associated with the transition from medieval to early modern times. Print: A knowledge Bomb The connative effect of the changes in society focilated by print was that 'a knowledge bomb' explosion was set-off in Western Europe. Einstein argues that print was an agent of change that had an effect on: -Changes in religion through the reformation, challenges to the authority of the church. Characteristics of Social Institutions -Power (often expressed through concepts of control, ownership and access) -values (concepts of:legality, morality, customs, social norms and knowledge) Inclusion (concepts of: identity, exclusion, membership and representation.

Digital Divide

Not everyone is accessible to digital technologies. -Access/education -Entertainment -Economics -Communication -Privacy -Surveillance -Property/open Digital divide is a social judgement- it isnt fair. The justice of information allows too spread. A term used to describe the discrepency between people who have access and the resources to use new information and communication tools such as the, internet. Its economic inequality between groups. There are major arguments why digital divide is important: -Economic equality -Social mobility -Democracy -Economic growth "Technology is only as powerful as it is accessible. Broader access brings education. Information and a sense of community that can help combat aids, ignorance and neglect. The power of a connected and enlightened world community is just the beginning'. " -Community informatics provides somewhat different approach to addressing the digital divide by focusing an issue, 'use' rather than simply access. -The digital divide should be made smaller, it is like many other economic or social problems which is a global issue. -The gap between countries onb the same continent is also getting wider. -'Globalization' is commonly used as a shorthand way of decribing the spread and connectedness of production, communication, and technologies across the world'.

Digital Literature & Arts

Many artists have thought about developing new forms of expressions and aesthetics. Stellarc reverses the computer device body.-Who controls the body?. Digital arts gradually got wider with a large amount of artists. It has become so mainstream, digital culture has become mainstream so fast. Aesthetics Interests: -programming -Interactivity (an interesting form of intertextuality) You can oriduce texts which are much more flexible. Many writers have thought about developing new forms of new media writing. Meta data is data that describes other data. Typical meta data includes such things as; page title, keywords and a description. Tags are a way of organising blog posts. Delicious.com is used for tagging. Is all tagging creating a Folksonomy?Folksonomy is how we arrange the information on facebook, google, youtube, etc. PROSUMERS A model of production in which the user of the product or service gets more involved in the process. Producers had all the power. Prosuming could be making more phone apps. Prosuming is orginally from the video industries referring to technologies armed between the consumer domestic market and the professional production market. Threadless.com - is T Shirt modelling. (they get their designs for free the company) E.G. The national lottery gets more money then the actual prize winner! Internet requires massive amounts of labour to sustain it. (Terranova, 2002:90). Crowd sourcing should allow users too gain something from the experience- even if its not monetary gain. AOL sold themselves to co-operation-remote staff community leaders. Networks contain vast amount of imformation. HYPERTEXT Texts composed of block of text and the elctronic links. It permits users/readers to choose their own paths through a set of possibilities. "nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen"-1994. EXAMPLES OF LITERACY HYPERTEXT: -Stuart Moulthrorp:Victory Garden -Shirly Jackson -Geoff Ryman: 253 The internet allows us to look at text in different ways. Authors of websites can experiment with different ways of conveying information. CYBERTEXT- is a cybernetic system that generates a different sequence of signs everytime the work is experiment. - It is a calculating device. Inanimate Alice is an interactive digital novel relating the experiences of Alice and her imaginary digital friend 'Brad'. The viewers experiences a combination of text, sound,imagery and interacts with a story at key points. Inaminate lacks of quality or ability of motion.