BCM101 New Media:

Histories/Industries/Practices
Wednesday, March 18

Week 3: Online Worlds (Part One)

The Web as Media Form

Dr Chris Moore
moorenet@gmail.com
 Case Studies:
 
The internet and the idea of the network 
 
The world wide web as a media form

Warning - some detours ahead...

September 6, 2006 by ngader

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ngader/236613122/sizes/o/)
Who invented the internet?
 Who 
invented
the
internet?

Was it Bill Gates?

 Was it Al 'Information
Superhighway Gore?
  "...the United State's current national
information policy 
 resembles the worst aspects of our old
agricultural policy, which left grain
rotting while people were starving.

We have warehouses of unused

information 'rotting' whole, while critical
questions are left unanswered and
critical problems are left unsolved”
image via: http://josephmarhee.wordpress.com/page/17/
(Gore cited in LaPorte et al 1992).
"I hear they
have the
internet on
computers now.
-Homer
Simpson
The web and the
internet like
television, print
and radio are all
represented in a
framework that
makes them appear
normal, natural
and ubiquitous.
the digital divide
Castells, M. (2004) 
The Network Society: a cross
cultural perspective,
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
Publishing Limited. 

"About 50% of India's women

are illiterate."

Words and image by Rita

Banerji, via flickr, March 2007.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rita_banerji
/500476241/sizes/m/
It is OK to hate Twitter...
as long as you Blog about it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ssandars
/87079260/
Image by Scootie, wall tag melbourne
victoria, 2006.
 Who invented television?
It wasn't Raymond
Williams – but he
wrote about
television as a
cultural
technology.

image via http://my.integritynet.com.au/barkertv/images/murphy%20tv.jpg

The invention of television was no single event or series
of events. It depended on a complex of inventions and
developments in electricity, telegraphy, photography,
motion pictures and radio. It can be said to have
separated out as a specific technological objective in the
period 1875-1890, and then, after a lag, to have developed
as a specific technological enterprise from 1920 through to
the first public television systems of the 1930s. Yet in each
of these stages it depended for parts of its realisation
on inventions made with other ends primarily in view.
(Williams, 1974; 7).
Williams, Raymond (1974) Television, Fontana, London (2nd ed 2003) Routledge Classics London.
 internet histories

History of the Internet http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=9hIQjrMHTv4
 http://www.wordle.net/create

"...think for yourself, question authority [and]...then came

Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s. McLuhan said, in the
 Socratic sense, the medium is the message, the words you
use, the modes of communication you use, determine the
realities you inhabit..."  
Timothy Leary - Change the Medium (11min:40sec).
The Illawarra
Mercury,
Page 3. 

Saturday,
March 14,
2009.
The social shaping of
technology

– Typically, and increasingly, technologies

come not in the form of separated,
isolated devices but as part of a whole,
as part of a system.

– MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985: p. 31).

In space no one can hear a tie fighter scream.
medium (noun, singular): of an intermediate nature. A means
of transmitting information and enabling communication.
 
media (noun, plural): multiple mediums
 
mass media (plural): those mediums including print, television
and radio designed to reach a large proportion of a
population.
 
Internet studies

hype 

dot.com 

empirical inquiry 

post wave

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raneko/2469861680/
New media cultures
The Internet and Web enable new forms of
cultural production.
 
The internet Structures the Experience of the
user.

The user of the web is a subjectivity of

production.
 
This reconfigures the notions of what is public
and what is private.
 The Memex

Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974)

Charles Babbage
1791 – 1871: English mathematician
whose innovations led to
prototypes of a programmable
computer.
Gottfried Leibnitz
 1646 – 1716: was a German
natural philosopher whose work
provided the theoretical
mathematics foundation of
modern computer logic.
Associative Memory
Hypertext forms before the internet:
footnotes
indexes 
library catalogue

Tim Berners-Lee at the European

Organization for Nuclear Research
(CERN) in 1980 developed HTML.

the Hypertext Mark-up

Language (HTML
is the language of the web.
Hypertextual

http://www.flickr.com/photos/natematias/33621866/sizes/o/
rubberpaw
http://www.pixellabs.com/images/browserwars.png
critique by design    http://www.flickr.com/photos/schoschie/8903529/
GNU/LINUX
Making do
The Network Society

Always On
Transformation of work
New economies
New subjectivities
 Conclusion
The Internet is a network of networks.

The Web As media form.

The social, political, economic and cultural

forces that shape these Technologies
produce aN unstable pattern of identity
and production.
 QUESTION:

Do you own your new

media devices or do they
own you?

(What is the message of your medium?)