"i" am equal to my (8) Bits?

I love Black Eyed Peas (BEP). They've always done fun mixes with their music and find interesting "pop" ways to put a new beat onto some old, popular numbers. This time around they played around with a very popular Sound Track from the movie Dirty Dancing.This is called ' The Time of My Life.'
What caught my attention and why I talk about it here is because of the video. The final product and the way it has been shot are both have interesting aspects that I discuss below.

But first the videos: The first is the music video itself and the second is the making of the music video. 

Note the following in the music video:

• Everyone turns into "Pixels/Bits" at some point or another during the video.
• In the beginning of the song- Will.I.Am's face, and later, Taboo's face morphs into a Monitor with the faces of the other band members showing on it.
• The use of 3D animated "avatars" of all the BEP members.
• The use of the latest Black Berry tablet (- which is suppose to give the I Pad a run for its money.

In the making of the video, note the following:

• the director says the video is trying to bridge the 80s with modern visual effects techniques. (Aside: the point of reference for what is "modern" here is questionable..for wasn't the 80s cyber punk films galore? )
• part of the video is shot with 3D- 360. 

Some of the points above bought to mind ideas by two important theories in the study of new media- Lev Manovich and Donna Haraway. 

The idea of everyone turning into pixels or "8 bits" is not a far cry from our present day lives. Many aspects of our selves/ lives, if not all, can be reduced to information or what is called binary code/bits/pixels. In other words, some basic unit of information readable by a computer.
Manovich in his seminal work 'The Language of New Media' (2001, The MIT Press, Massachusetts) argues that media became "new" with the convergence of two major historical trajectories- that of computing and media technologies.
This convergence has led to "the translation of all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers."
The reason I bring in this idea- is like mentioned above, our "selves" are in a lot of ways reducible to information that can be accessed by computers. We can be "reduced" to pixels and bits as much as we can be "reduced" to genetic codes (Haraway takes this a step further, which will be discussed later).

Think about it! Right from when a baby is conceived and "mapped" on a sonogram as a "digital image", to recording home videos of when a baby first walks, to academic and work records online, biometrics for passports and visas, profile pages on networking sites, email, blogs, CCTVs.. and the list is endless.  It doesn't stop there. We, the government, marketeers, search engines etc. all keep track of our online presences in the form of billions and billions of bits of information.So BEP's video is probably only a representation of what we have (it's not even a thing of the future any more) become.
A glance at the above would bring in questions related to surveillance, power and privacy. These issues however are much too large in magnitude to bring  in here, and would serve for interesting debates in another post. What I would want to point out to, is the new possible ways in which we can and probably need to start thinking about ourselves.


Donna Haraway  was one of the first people to contemplate these new possibilities. In her meditation on the complex relationships between information, body and power, she revisits and reworks previous ideas from information sciences and cybernetic theory to conclude that " nothing, in essence, can resist being coded as information, including the 'human' body." She goes a step further and proposes that any object can be interfaced with another, if the appropriate standard and code can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.
What the above means (at the cost of over simplifying) is that basically, since all objects, organisms and spaces can be reduced to basic units of information (like pixels, binary code, bits etc), they can also "interface" with each other and exchange and incorporate information, if the right "common language" can be built.
Thus, Haraway suggests that we would have to break down all previous barriers that exist between human, animal and machine. The entities that emerge from such an exchange are what Haraway calls 'Cyborgs'.
 (ideas of Haraway as discussed in Gane and Beer's ' New Media: The Key Concepts; 2008; Berg Publications; New York.)

Considering all this, those interesting frames of Will.I.Am and Taboo in the BEP video with monitors for heads and human bodies, may not be such an implausible idea after all.

The "Future" is now! :)

Wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year!

Cheers!

Facebook Redesigns Profile Pages - DesignTAXI.com

Facebook Redesigns Profile Pages - DesignTAXI.com


This a really interesting link explaining how Facebook has redesigned its profile pages recently. The constant way in which Social Networking Sites are re-inventing their templates and pages brings to my mind- two things- one is Beer and Burrow's argument mentioned in my last post 'The firt trail on the map'. They talked of how profile pages are the commodity or what are "prosumed".

But it also got me thinking about a very interesting Masters' thesis- that of Jeff Gingers, I came across as part of my literature review so far.  This designing and constant re-designing is what Gingers calls the "Politics of Interface". It's a very simple, but profound idea. Something that many of us, save probably designers, are aren't overtly sensitive to. While many sites- especially Social Networking Sites, Job Search sites, Dating sites; and in the India context- Matrimonial sites- allow us the "freedom" to design and personalize/customize our profile the way we want it, one needs to stop and ask- Do they really?

Has anyone every thought about how  the basic information we need to put out in these sites determine how our profile pages look? Or how putting such information out may determine the choices we have with regard to our privacy? Further- like the above Design Taxi article states- Facebook has now pushed our photos to the fore, and is emphasizing work/education information. Have we stopped to ask- Do I want my pictures to speak for me? For after all,when someone takes a picture of you,it come from the perspective of the photographer, and not necessarily the subject being photographed.

So while most of us our struggling with changes in User Interface when a web page's design changes around, maybe we should stop to ask how such a redesign influences, and probably determines the way" we build" our profile pages?? Is there really a "freedom of choice" there?

I continue to muse...

Cheers!

The first trail on the map.

Facebook- that was the one phenomena that set me off into the fascinating world of Web 2.0. But of course, while Facebook is the "face" of this issue- it only is one illustration of all that is possible online. This forces one back to the basics, and thus has begun my journey into learning the language that envelops so many disciplines/fields- from computer sciences and bio-technology to media studies and visual communication design.

In the course of my readings- I came across what I can say to date, has best articulated my preoccupations with this subject. David Beer and Roger Burrows, in an article titled 'Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations' [Sociological Research Online; 12 (5) 17] talk of the challenges that lie ahead of Sociologists in analyzing and studying a context/setting that is so dynamic and fast-changing.

In a section titled 'Sociology of Web 2.0'- Beer and Burrows talk of three major, interrelated issues that need sociological scrutiny:

1. The idea of what is termed the "prosumer" or the producer-consumer of content online. This possibility leads us to problematize the concepts of "producer" and "consumer". Beer and Burrows emphasize that while a lot of networks and sites allowing overwhelming user-generated production/consumption of  content are free, there is still large commercial underpinnings to them. Secondly, and most interesting for me- is the idea that it is the users' profiles, and the everyday/mundane that is increasingly "prosumed" .
2. The second issue that they highlight is the "the mainstreaming of private information posted to the public domain" This deals with the fact that so many of us share so much of our "private" everyday lives online. This has obviously seen a shift in our notions of what remains "private" and "public". The blurring and often gray division between the two has posed many a challenge to portals, websites  and networks online in formulating their policies on privacy. 
3. The third issue is that of 'democratization' or the notion of a "people's internet". Web 2.0 has allowed for previously unimaginable kinds and levels of participation and collaborations online and off. This includes issues related to citizenship and governance. But how democratic the net really is, is yet to be seen. 

The above three points sum up in the most lucid manner, everything that has captured my attention as a curious soul, if not researcher. However, I am still struggling with bringing in a certain focus and clarity on how exactly I would like to engage with these three issues discussed above.

At the moment I see two big challenges ahead of me, in making a progress with this course. One- what sites do I locate this  these issues in? Blogs, Social Networking Sites, Wikis?? which ones? For now- it is Social Networking sites that most capture my curiosity. Further, how do I actually go about it, is another question for another post altogether.
The second challenge I see ahead of me is the socio-cultural milieu I plan to position myself in. I.e.- the "Indian"* context. This is in a way a double-edged sword. On one hand, in studying something like networking or notions/values of privacy- "India" , with all its contradictions and contradistinctions,can provide a rich complexity on how it is "prosuming" Web 2.0. On the other hand however, India is still a place where such a resource, if one may call it that, is still not ubiquitous. It remains in the hands of a niche, an elite class of people. This in itself limits the audience I hope to collaborate with as part of my study.

Well for now..this is what I muse about.  Till the next trail on the map...

Cheers!

* I use the term "Indian"  rather hesitatingly, but do so for the lack of any other. I would like to say though, that I am aware that "Indian" can be a complex nay, a problematic term when used in the blanket manner that I have. However, till I have figured out a better term to substitute it with... kindly indulge my usage of it. :)

Getting Started.

I had a friend who once said in her status message that Mark Zuckerberg could turn our lives upside down in an instant- he just needs to shut Facebook down. The same can be applied to Twitter, Orkut and a million other ways that we network online today.
Social Media, or Social Networking as we all know it better- is very obviously becoming second nature to all of us. This of course is preceded by the fact that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have grown by leaps and bounds- something that doesn't necessarily require stating.

Having said so, I intend to, in my PhD thesis, explore all of these areas. The past 7-8 years have been bewildering for many of us out there for suddenly, we went from that sole school/college re-union a year, being connected with every possible person you vaguely remembered hanging out with in school, almost 24/7-Online!

All of this has opened up for me a whole new curios world as a researcher- and the journey has only begun.
It has taken me into a whole world where human meets machine and maybe human is machine/machine is human!

I hope this becomes a space where I can chart my engagement with this world-  rather OUR (Brave?) new world!

Cheers!