Drawing on my previous work (scholastic and personal) in social media spaces like YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, and Twitter, I’ve decided to examine why consumers share what used to be private media content with the world. This is a unique question, because most of the dialog about social media is in the is-it-good or is-it-bad binary, and I feel that in ignoring users directly and interrogating their motivations for production, scholarship and journalism have lost an opportunity. Are YouTubers aspiring filmmakers? Or home movie makers just looking to share memories with friends and family? Are SoundClouders recording for posterity (archiving) or promotion (listen to this man!) ?

For my research, I’ve decide to look at the iPhone app Instagram to see what powers a burgeoning photo-sharing social media network. I presented a more detailed outline of my methods, motivations, and research goals to the department last week.

Here’s the Prezi:

And the recording of the presentation, complete with a friend calling me a humanist (true!):

Zachary McCune presents on Consumer Media Production by zmccune

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org knows and understands what Brand was talking about. His site has not only become world (in)famous, it is done so by dealing in information. It makes “free” what others believe is quite “expensive.” It makes public what was private, problematicizing privacy in the already slippery age of cloud computing and trust in computer networks. So much of what was once physically kept personal has bee electronically made ubiquitous, and in the process privacy itself as become as easy to sneak around as the familiar command “copy-paste.”

Julian Assange has become a sort of villain. He does not photograph well, looking at once sad, sickly, and sinister. His motives unclear, most Americans take his actions at face value: in releasing hundreds of thousands of secret American documents, Assange alienates a fundamental American right to … what is it actually that he’s done illegally?

Remember Watergate? That was this historical episode when an American president tried to conceal illegal actions with intimidation, money, and aspirations to American patriotism. Two journalists stuck to the case and in the process became American heroes, far more patriotic than the “patriots” who had tried to protect the president with lies and threats. These men would be played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in a film that made their dogged sense of “freeing information” into a sort of patriotic virtue. The implications of the film and the event itself were that there is nothing to fear about the truth if you are among the just and responsible. Nixon wasn’t.

I met Julian Assange in Austria, at a digital festival in an opera house overlooking the Danube. It was the fall of 2009, and he was in Austria to receive an award from the Ars Electronica Festival for his contributions to public discourse. Assange gave a speech in which he never smiled and never laughed, but talked instead about the need to give people around the world a safe way to share information that the world needed to know. He saw himself and his organization as more of a technology of protecting those who would share secrets than a political statement on secrets.

But his ideology was powerful and unmistakable. A former journalist, inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, Assange had begun WikiLeaks to protect the “deep throats” of today and tomorrow. He expressed a hope that the information that wanted to be free could be. And of couse, that it should be. He was prepared to go to all lengths for this conviction.

A year later, we now know that Assange has gone to all lengths for this conviction. He has been labeled a “terrorist,” has been criticized by world governments, has been implicated in several court cases, and most sadly, attacked by journalists and news organizations themselves. Assange’s dour disposition is nothing more than the frank understanding that despite the freedom he has given information, we refuse to be liberated by it.

Zachary McCune will not stand for the witch trial of a man who actually forces accountability in the golden age of the unaccountable.

[ Printed in this week's Newport Mercury ]

a recent art projec by Schuyler Maclay, Al Urim and others foregrounds the impending crisis of augmented reality. in the project Maclay and a fellow artist build a 10 by 10 by 10 foot cube, open at the top that seals them in along with a host of raw (de)construction materials. two webcams survey the cube’s interior, streaming the artists live to the web.

theopencube.net

the cube was placed on Brown University’s Main Green on May 1st, 2010. it was a part of a broad curation of outdoor art pieces comprising a second student project called “Green Screen.” the cube was one of the most successful pieces on the green, because it was big, loud, and literally/figuratively opaque. when visitors drew near the cube, they often walked completely around it, looking for something to see. instead, they were directed to a computer monitor, forcing them uncomfortably to mediate their immediate physical experience of the cube. in their desire to see inside the cube, and understand the project, visitors were forced to look away from it, into an entire different object. theoretically, this was to keep access to the cube as an artistic site consistent across experiences (online and in person) as the project was offered for the two communities of physical and virtual reality.

in practice however, these tactic forced viewers to confront the growing mediation of physical events. it suggested the capitulation of society to mediation (what guy debord would have called his “society of the spectacle”) and forced visitors to live in the world they are creating- where direct access has become impossible because of our fascination with it being “everywhere” rather than “somewhere.” the global aspiration of local events like the cube erases and ignores their position as a locality at all. the artists in the open cube are neighbors you cannot speak to, or knock on the door and say hi.

because there is no door, and they won’t speak to you.

responding only to messages and instructirons posted live on their website, the open cube artists were compelled to not make a home of their cube, but to raucously destroy it. like a gamer who shoots up his environment, shooting friends to see if they will die, and throwing a grenade at his own feet to see if he can kill himself, the avatared-artists of the open cube were forced to rip up pillows, cut a couch in half, and graffiti the walls.

then some one (pretty sure it was me) told them to cut a whole in the wall so the spectators outside could see in. this proved a terrible mistake. for once the walls were rendered porous, attention shifted away from the problematic experience/foregrounding of mediation and instead became artists-as-zoo-animals. in the future, disallowing commands for interior views other than from the webcam should be added to the project’s instructions.

it’s been a few days since i was on the main green, typing commands to my friends in the cube. but the project is still working its way through my thoughts. i think its a wonderful project to have travel, for it seems to fight travel and local specificity by aspiring to just being somewhere in the non-space of the internet, but it is somewhere, and the people that comment on it will surely change depending on its location.

who knows, maybe some people won’t want the artists to destroy themselves or the interior space. maybe they’ll ask the artists to write poetry, or take a nap, or become home-makers. and that would be quite interesting.

here is a story about stories; with a question about whether stories are still stories and whether we are beginning to live in a post-story age.

the already cool mit media lab has founded a “center for future storytelling.” the purpose of this “labette” as the initiative is described, is to engage in studying and possibly saving the narrative.

or as the official press release states:

to revolutionize how we tell our stories, from major motion pictures to peer-to-peer multimedia sharing. By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

in the recent new york times article on the center’s founding, the proposition is posited that the narrative is danger amongst the flood of new technologies, and patterns of cultural storytelling that are disrupted by them. but of course, disruption is really re-direction, if not re-intrepretation, so while some might cry wolf and see the founding of the c.f.f.s as a sign of the academy overreaching its aims, i think that the project should actually have great implications for current, future, and past narrative-producers. not because it will develop an essentialist theory of the narrative (though there is CERTAINLY a danger that this is how the initiative will begin, or be misconstrued by the public) nor because the narrative is really in need of rescuing. rather, i think narrative studies are entirely under-represented in media & cultural research, and if our unique technological moment is indeed as seismic as has been suggested, then the inflection we stand upon needs thorough, and engaged interaction.

it’s a story i can’t wait to read.

especially if i get a chance to help write.

but here i am, on the floor in the auditorium of international house (what a beautiful building!) listening to lawrence lessig speak, after years of hearing him in youtube clips and reading his books.

it’s a little like seeing a concert with your favorite artist after years of listening to their albums and proslytizing their music.

as lessig starts, sitting on stage with fred benenson (arguably the hub of sfc), he tells the crowd that he could not be more thrilled and proud to be at a meeting with this many people. he recalls what it was like when he wrote the book, and the student organization started.

fred corrects him for sounding optimistic, when he’ well known for being a pessimist.

“that’s why i had to get out of this movement” lessig explains “because I needed to be pessimistic”

hybrid economies

despite his pessimism, lessig argues that we are living/entering an Interesting new economy, a hybrid economy. in this dualistic economy, there is a captilastic sphere, and communist sphere (if you forgive the political re-reading) wherein there is both business (amazon) and sharing/volunteering (reader reviews) working in tandem.

there are two possible forms of hybrids:

type 1: “darth vader-type”

inspired by george lucas’ sharecropping mash-up forum, where users can mash-up star wars footage, but lucas will own it.

type 2: “nine inch nails-type”

where the recombination of media allows the recombinateur owns the work. they don’t own the elements, but they own their approach/curation of media.

lessig begins talking about valenti, the MPAA head he debated several times throughout the last decade, and how valenti inspired him with his claims that we were raising an entire generation of people living against the law. he thinks that we do need to consider how we live, not against the law, but changing the law. live within rules, but rules you help set.

lessig reported in june 2007, that he was moving on from issues of intellectual property in the digital age. now, he is moving on to political reform, something he claims is both more academic interest

“9% of Americans polled thought that congress members were doing a good job. More people supported the british crown at the outbreak of the Revolution.”

change congress, the group that lessig has started to campaign for poltical reform, has faced interesting pressure, and had interesting solicitation from groups who want to convene a new constitutional convention.

the future of students for free culture

“five years from now, ten years from now, what is students for free culture?” benenson asks.

“sfc needs to pick some fights” lessig says. he remembers the successful drm campaign and hopes that can be the norm for further fights. lessig thinks that the “low hanging fruit” fight is making university publications (at institutions around the country) open access. force top flight educational institutions to open up the work of their faculty’s work for the rest of the world who can’t afford to pay for access otherwise.

“it’s fun to rally around fights, they’re lots of parties involved with fights….”

drawing the line in the sand/defining free culture

“we have to come to recognize the principles that will guide us” lessig says, “it’s about whats defining for our culture”

in the next 24 hours, the berkman center will celebrate one web day in part by unveiling a radical new interface through which blog posts, tweets, youtube videos, flickr images, and raw urls will coexist as a dynamic bodies of information situated within a totalizing system. using tags as display criterion, users will be able to construct, deconstruct, assemble and reassemble heterogeneous media which share common tags or content types. much of this interface responds to david weinberger‘s idea of the folksonomy, outlined in everything is miscellaneous.

the individuals responsible for this interface (i balk at calling at art piece because it has such utilitarian value as not exist merely as aesthetic) are a barcelona-based technology group called bestiario. bestiario have been leading a reassessment of information aesthetics (or the aesthetics of informatics as i like to call it) and are interested in finding new ways of visualizing information so as to give users more control/insight into the interrealatedness of data.

to be perfectly frank, david weinberger is the reason that the berkman center (and i) became involved in collaborating with bestiario, and reimagining the ways in which a whole bunch of media could be creatively re-visualized. i became involved with the project, because seth young, communications guru, asked me to reconsider the berkman website and the horde of content we had from this spring’s berkman@10 conference. how should this be packaged? how should this be organized? how should this be made complete? seth asked me.

i didn’t necessarily know. but i did know that the existing system was not working. within a week at the center, i compiled a list of all the materials we had from berkman@10. there were photostreams, twitter categories, youtube videos, blog posts, official videos, wikis, delicious items, and more. the only way i had to effective corral them, was to make a masterlist of hyperlinked items, and a separate delicious feed. it feel ineffective and one-dimensional, no way to related the material meaningfully or to demonstrate the ways in which this closely related set of data actually fit together.

david weinberger found me in the kitchen one afternoon and asked what i was up to. i responded by telling him about my problem of multiplicious media, an idea i did not yet know was a bit of his specialty. he mentioned the bestiario group, and showed me the work they’d done with the TED talks. i expressed my deep enjoyment of the work, but wondered: how could bestiario manage tagged content across various media types.

to skip towards the conclusion, bestiario under the guidance of santiago ortiz, had a way of relating multiple media types. they called their 6pli system, and it worked by creating a dynamic interface of an individual’s delicious feed. other groups have played with graphic re-rendering delicious as interface, but few groups if any, have worked as hard as bestiario to make that interface totalizing. i mean totalizing in the sense that it stops being a list of links taking you out of the space, and more like a browser opening content within the space.

where the hyperlink as been the building block of web1.0, related data has become the essential part of web2.0. as a result of this progression, the need has emerged for a space where one can judged the interconnectedness of data, and simultaneously engage the individual data elements. it is a new way of seeing information, one that situates the view of the data/media within context before providing it individually. this effectively reverses the current traditions of the internet, which hide such contextualization, even on a micro scale in favor of one to one hyperlink relations.

this is the domain of the scroll, the need to move vertically up and down through information as list. but following the nomenclature of the world wide web, bestiario reimagines information as webbed rather than listed, and as a result, i believe that there “view” of data actually provides a robust new viewing scheme, that adds an intelligence previously expected of the user alone. that is, the expectation that connections are made across the arrays of informatic regimes currently used by people from google to wordpress, up/down informational organization.

the domain of the scroll is the rearticulation of print, within dynamic digitalia, a possibly unnatural carryover from print to code culture like the decorative columns are a carryover from greco-roman building into an architecture that does not need them structurally, only symbolically. in this way, we must wonder how else our digital paradigms are still contigent upon print traditions, and whether the continuation of those traditions is really necessary.

in march of last year, i was in new york for a meeting when i decided to hit the museum of modern art. the museum was hosting an exhibit called “design and the elastic mind” and i was so impressed with its content and convictions, that i began to reassess the ways in which human design influences human cognition. one of the most virulent threads woven through that exhibition was what i later called the aesthetics of information in a paper i wrote some weeks later. projects like re-wiring the spy, flight patterns, or we feel fine attempted to reassess the presence of information with new aesthetic treatments. treatments that allowed new patterns to form within the information, and patterns that revealed hidden meanings in the data.

i feel that the bestiario project, to which i have served ironically as a mediator, is a project within which the aesthetics of informatics are carried towards overthrowing the scroll/print regime in digital culture. where tags and folksonomies led to a reassessment of how information could be organized, it seems that bestiario’s interface for the berkman@10 conference might provoke a reevalution of the ways that information, data, and media are displayed in digital systems. this is not to say that it is a perfect product or that it is the future of digital structuration of information, but rather that it does something powerfully new which may yet lead to an overturning of a leaf, or the discovery of a leaf hidden in the cacophony of meaning just in front of us.