Digital Culture Compass (Melanie Baevsky)

On June 22, 2009 I was situating myself in anticipation of my evening commute home from New York City. As the train left Grand Central Terminal, I naturally turned to my BlackBerry to check the most recently updated Twitter feeds that I follow. At 5:46 p.m., CNN tweeted: “Two D.C. Metro trains collided during rush hour.” I immediately called my younger brother, Ben, who was in D.C. at the time, to see if he was alright—he hadn’t even heard about the crash yet, so I told him to check his Twitter feed. 5:50 p.m.: “CNN confirms at least one fatality in the DC Metro train collision.” 6:05 p.m.: “Metro spokeswoman confirms at least two fatalities in DC Metro train collision.” And on, and on, the whole trip home as the New York Times, AP News Alert, and hundreds upon hundreds of other Twitter users caught on. When my mom picked me up at the train at 6:15, she asked how my day was and if I had been in touch with Ben. “Yes, I called him right away!” I said. “He’s fine though, don’t worry.” Worry? Neither she nor my dad had heard about the accident yet.

Both of my parents actively read newspapers, watch CNN, and read online reports. Their lack in timely information was a function of accessibility, not a function of the quality or quantity of their sources. Upon questioning, my dad revealed that communal televisions mounted on the walls throughout his office air Bloomberg and CNBC around the clock. While people rarely spend large amounts of time watching, news still floats through the workplace and everyone becomes passively aware of stories as they break. This is no different from checking the Bloomberg or CNBC Twitter feed: in general, each tweet is the station’s latest title or lede. The entire stream creates a minute-by-minute news report from which the reader can take what he or she wants , ignoring the rest. And with Twitter, this “taking” has far more potential than just the absorption of information. Users can follow up on the article through the source’s website; can re-tweet the article, thereby spreading the story; and can even watch the development in real time on Twitter as other users tweet and re-tweet relevant and complementary information. Accessibility is no longer an issue; with Twitter, instantaneous publishing and collaboration can be done from both the web and from mobile devices across the world, anywhere that there is a signal.

By means of this account I would argue that yes, I have the ability to be more well-informed than people in my position ten years ago; that is, if I choose to take advantage of the sources that manage this information.

Rated: from 2 votes

The 2004 film “Downfall” is a German-Austrian epic drama that depicts the final ten days of Adolf Hitler’s life in his Berlin bunker and Nazi Germany in 1945. One scene in the film, in which Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) launches into a furious tirade upon facing the realization that Germany is about to lose the war, has become the basis for hundreds of viral internet videos. These wildly anachronistic memes take the scene and place satirical subtitles over the action (filmed in German) so that Hitler now seems to be reacting to some setback in present-day politics, sports, popular culture, etc. Examples range from “Hitler Finds Out That President Obama is Not a US Citizen” to “Hitler Finds Out Michael Jackson Has Died” to, more recently, “Hitler Responds to the iPad.”

While much of this content is regarded as hysterically popular, I am surprised that it is made so readily available with its controversial nature encompassing both copyright infringement and political distastefulness. With regard to the former, YouTube uses a censorship-friendly automated filtering system called Content ID. This approach allows copyright holders, such as Downfall’s Constantin Film, to identify and manage their content as it appears on YouTube. According to the YouTube Help Page, “The tool creates ID files which are then run against user uploads and, if a match occurs, the copyright holders policy preferences are then applied to that video.” According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, copyright owners have used the system to take down everything from home videos of a teenager singing “Winter Wonderland” to a toddler lip-syncing to Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero”—how and why does Contantin Film allow these Downfall parodies to remain online? Furthermore, the memes trivialize not only the Holocaust, but also World War II by turning Hitler into a caricature and a spokes person.

Here is the original clip; where do you draw the line—if you draw one at all—with parodied material?

Rated: from 2 votes

FiveThirtyEight.com: the name is a nod to the number of votes available in the United States electoral college, the concept is a “nonpartisan polling aggregation website with a liberal-leaning blog,” and the mastermind behind it all is statistical wunderkind (according to the New York Times) Nate Silver.

Silver decided the best way to read political polls was to consider them all in relation to one another. He, not unlike numerous others, believed that averaging multiple polls would yield more acute results and provide for more accurate predictions than simply trying to pick out the best one. But what makes FiveThirtyEight difference is that Silver developed an algorithm by which polls that perform consistently well are considered more seriously than the polls that do not.

During the 2008 presidential election, FiveThirtyEight provided a continually up-to-date assessment of probability for electoral outcomes. According to Wikipedia, the method proved to be highly accurate, as Silver correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states in the presidential election, as well as every Senate race in 2008. In the “off season,” the site continues to publish articles on a wide variety of topics in current politics with a statistically analytical slant.

The site’s information is presented in a blog style that allows for commentary on every article. This feature creates a virtual feedback loop that plays host to political discussion and allows for interpersonal communication as opposed to simple reception of mass messages. The comments begin by directly addressing Nate and the points he makes in a given piece, and as time passes, a conversation emerges among the readers.

Rated: from 3 votes

Axel Bruns coined the term produsage—a hybrid form of simultaneous production and usage—to describe the current paradigm shift towards user-led collaborative content creation. It is self-organizing and, for the most part, independent from commercial objectives, yet has the power to generate significant value. This movement can be seen in a wide variety of online environments and has had an increasing impact on media, economics, law, social practices, and democracy itself. Produsage provides a new approach to conceptualizing these phenomena by translating the traditional assumptions associated with industrial age production models into an informational age, social media, Web 2.0 environment. Bruns’s article Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage examines the produsage element of digital content ranging from ad hoc networks such as the blogosphere to more centralized sites of collaborative work such as Wikipedia. He points to four ‘key principles’ of produsage, each of which he suggests makes amateur forms of production consequential. Open Participation and Communal Evaluation, in particular, is significant to media and cultural discourse because it evokes a diverse range of “knowledge, skills, talents, and ideas” (Bruns, 2008, p. 24), in addition to having established itself as an increasingly prevalent aspect of the public information environment.

When examined together and thoroughly understood, Bruns’s key principles coalesce to better describe the concept of produsage. One is Open Participation and Communal Evaluation, which implies a shift from dedicated individuals and teams as producers to a broader-based, distributed generation of content by a wide community of participants. Fluid Hierarchy and Ad Hoc Meritocracy as well as Unfinished Artifacts and Continuing Process make up two more principles. Finally, Common Property and Individual Rewards suggests the frequent employment of copyright systems which acknowledge authorship and prohibit unauthorized commercial use, yet enable continuing collaboration on further content improvement. This latter concept forms what Burns refers to as the “core” of produsage communities:

Those committed, long-term participants in produsage who rise to the higher levels of the produsage heterarchies, who coordinate collaborative effort, maintain and steward the information commons, and represent the community to itself and to the wider society around it. (Bruns, 2008, p. 30)

When combined with the Open Participation and Communal Evaluation concept, these produsage elements have significant implications for the future of the publishing industry. In the article The Virtual Sphere 2.0: The Internet, the Public Sphere and Beyond, Papacharissi states that “the ultimate goal of the public sphere is public accord and decision making” (Papacharissi, p. 5), which parallels Bruns’s argument for and all-inclusive public sphere, thereby blurring the lines that have previously defined mass media.

Rated: from 1 votes

Hyperfragmentation of media channels, as discussed by Joseph Turow in his article Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age, has one key consequence: messages get lost. Every aspect of new media shifts the way consumers interact with brands and their advertisements. Saatchi & Saatchi is a self-proclaimed “full service, integrated communications network” that examines the relationships that people have with products, services, and entities. Accordingly, Saatchi understands and appeals to consumer appreciation for love and respect. In varying proportions, these two properties differentiate brands from products from fads, and from a fourth classification that the company has come to call Lovemarks. This relationship can be better understood by looking at their Love/Respect Axis. This approach gives consumers and entirely new way to connect with the products they care about to ensure that in the face of innovation, brands remain intimate, inspirational, and invaluable. No matter how disjointed the communication landscape gets, Lovemarks will never get lost.

Rated: from 1 votes

OK Go – Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

In 2006, the band OK Go sidestepped its record company and uploaded a homemade video to YouTube featuring a choreographed routine on treadmills to the song Here it Goes Again. The video reportedly received over one million views in the first six days and was performed live at the MTV Video Music Awards that year.

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an OpEd piece entitled WhoseTube in which OK Go lead singer and guitarist Damian Kulash explains how record companies miss out on the benefits of viral user-generated content:

Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

While Kulash may be a bit snarky, I think his argument is spot-on. Read the article, watch the video, and share your thoughts in the comments!

Rated: from 9 votes

User-generated content (UGC): stuff that people make for free. It can be silly, but much of it is valuable, contrary to Jaron Lanier’s suggestion that a contribution to a greater whole without credit or compensation lacks both meaning and worth.

An interesting aspect of UGC is the way in which norms are noticed and enforced online. The Psychology of the Internet by Patricia Wallace engages this idea by relating it to Hobbes’s Leviathan: the power that enforces adherence to society’s rules and standards. There is indeed a Leviathan on the Internet to which most people willingly give up freedoms in order to “preserve the value and energy of the medium itself,” she says. For starters, users may choose to observe how an online forum for UGC—from YouTube to Wikipedia—operates before becoming an active participant. Explicit rules and guidelines are often clearly spelled out and if a contributor falters, other members of the group will not hesitate to offer reproach via comments or “inappropriate activity” reports.

Additionally, Caterina Fake suggests in her article Participatory Media and Why I Love it (and Must Defend It) that once UGC is produced, intelligent social mediaites can “filter out the noise”. People can effectively take what they want and ignore the rest. With platforms such as Twitter, this “taking” has far more potential than just the absorption of information. Users can follow up on content through the source’s website; can re-tweet links, thereby spreading the content; and can even engage with the community at large as other users tweet and re-tweet relevant and complementary information. And this filtration not only exists, it works: LaunchCamp recently released statistical data showing that 80% of online content is consumed on sites other than where it originates, including UGC aggregators such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg.

UGC’s significance is better understood alongside its analog precursors. Magazines, for example, are meant to communicate with the masses; letters to the Editor create a feedback loop essential to the relationship between message sender and receiver, and to their engagement with the information that has been disseminated. The print medium serves as a forum for civilized discussion and informed response from both ordinary people sharing their perspective and experts adding important facts. Certain types of new media simply extend this concept in breadth and timeliness, and not only in the print realm—just look at the relationship between America’s Funniest Home Videos and YouTube.

Rated: from 2 votes

Blogger.com’s 1999 launch called attention to the controversial interplay between the proliferation of information and the nation’s increasingly short attention span. Blogs were charged with stunting our ability to consume long form literature; yet, after a decade, they have achieved astronomical popularity and Blogger.com is the foremost blogging platform.

Today, two of the innovative minds behind Blogger.com, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another service capturing people’s attention: Twitter. Founded in March 2006 and launched publicly in July, Twitter lets users post brief updates about everyday thoughts and activities to the Internet. Each entry, or “tweet”, must be under 140 characters and, resembling a blog, posts appear in reverse chronological order. When you follow someone on Twitter, that user’s tweets appear on your main page, and if you follow 20 users, their tweets join together, forming a list of up-to-the-minute information running down the page like an 18th century social gazette.

Over the past few years, Twitter has acquired Summize, Values of n, and, most recently, Mixer Labs. While a business model for turning a profit is unclear, Twitter has engaged in a number of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaigns.  Namely, they turned the site red to promote World AIDS Day in 2009 and have partnered with Room to Read to promote literacy around the world.

Malcom Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, examines the process by which select trends reach exponential popularity. Gladwell asserts that virtually every influential trend results from the interplay among three key factors: the Power of Context, which suggests that humans are strongly influenced by their surroundings; the Law of the Few, which suggests that a tiny percentage of people work to build a trend’s momentum; and the Stickiness Factor, which refers to the memorable impact a successful development must make. Since 2006, Twitter has developed in accordance with these elements and has “tipped” into wide-scale popularity, revolutionizing the way that users come to understand and interact with one another. (Read on …)

Rated: from 6 votes

Last week, when J.D. Salinger died, everyone seemed to have something to say. Who, after all, has not befriended Holden Caulfield in the quiet of their childhood haven or been otherwise touched by The Catcher in the Rye? The Internet was subsequently hit with a blizzard of information about Salinger; it served as a forum where his life and work could be turned over and examined in new ways: constantly refreshed, revisited, and revered.

One such flurry, “Remembering Salinger: Dave Eggers“, surfaced on the New Yorker’s online Book Bench, and I found the following point about Salinger’s declination to publish quite profound:

The nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.

Salinger was elusive and enigmatic. He had not published a new work since 1965 and lived in near-total isolation, having swung down from the apex of influence to an extreme abstention from society. The phrase “communication is social” serves as a critical commentary on the role of new media in society. Despite his sequestered existence, Salinger exemplifies the implications of this statement. He and his canonized American novels from the 1950s have transcended technological advancements and societal progression with an online presence first inspired by his works then molded and maintained by his critics. Despite having stepped away from the printing press himself, Salinger was kept present through new media.

But what exactly is “new media”? Professor Gillespie’s February 4th lecture identified three key classifications:

1. New online forms
2. Old media translated to new environments
3. New aspects of traditional media

This blog, for example, falls under the “new online forms” category. It is a production platform that heralds a new framework for communicating ideas. It aims to blend styles, strategies, and structures to express its content with unprecedented exactitude. And it has changed the way people view writing, the writing process, and the finished product.

While the debate continues over whether or not Holden Caulfield’s outlook resonates as precisely with today’s net generation as it has with previous ones, the importance of new, social media is clear and its future is bound to catch us all by surprise.

Rated: from 5 votes

Welcome to my blog for Professor Gillespie’s Spring 2010 New Media and Society class! My name is Melanie Baevsky. I am a Junior at Cornell University where I study Communication with an emphasis on media studies and social influence.

I have had the opportunity to hone my skills and build upon the intellectual foundation developed through my coursework with a number of relevant work experiences in publishing and in public relations (PR). In 2009 I participated in the Condé Nast Summer Intern Program where I worked in editorial at Brides.com. While there, I wrote, built, and reviewed content for the site. I also learned a great deal about blogging and search engine optimization (SEO), which I believe will come in handy for this course. Additionally, I spent my fall semester studying in the United Kingdom through Boston University’s London Internship Program. I took courses in PR, advertising, and pop culture, and I spent eight weeks working full time with the Consumer Team at Fleishman-Hillard on a diverse international client portfolio. Both of these experiences were extremely formative and rewarding in their own ways, and, together, have inspired and driven my interest in the prevalent interplay among mass media, technology, and culture.

Check back each week for my thoughts on new media and society. Also be sure to check out the course blog for relevant updates and selections from the best COMM 3200 student blogs.

Rated: from 4 votes