New Media Cultures

having been around here for nearly a year now, I still haven't worked out what tagging is. enlightenment please?

any pub football teams needing strips for the new season? check these out

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=003&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&viewitem=&item=130129124796&rd=1&rd=1

need to sell them as my tv has blown up lol!

Looking at globalisation and the arrogance of the west ands it's desire to impose it's own culture on the rest of the world, I would like to consider the McDonald's corporation and it's introduction of Halal (meaning lawful) meat in some of it's UK restaurants in order to attract Muslim customers, especially in predominantly Muslim areas in order to boost sales. The company is a symbol of globalisation with over 26,500 restaurants in 119 countries. Its trademark golden arches are recognisable around the world, so I think that to introduce Halal meat is a step in the right direction, and proves that although a worldwide corporation, it is not entirely hellbent on forcing the traditions of the west onto non-western communities. Admittedly, I can't list any other ways that it is attempting to become less westernised, but it is considering the religious practices of other nationalities residing in Britain, and is attempting to incorporate their needs into its business practices, if only for the purposes of pulling in more sales. As you would expect, some are opposed to it, believing that it is another way to appease the Muslim population of Britain. This could be looked at as the East trying to impose its cultures and traditions on the west, but I believe that the west is much more guilty of this.

Video of Gary play battlefield 2 - up to now he has spent approx 140 hours fighting a simulated war against others online. There are no giant American babies in this video though, Only guns, tanks and helicopters. As the lecture notes state, "we are now all enlisted in the war on terror". The game allows you to participate in the spectacle of war, without actually having to endanger your life by really fighting in it. Since 9/11, but not limiting the cause of our interest strictly to this event, as we must consider the gulf war, sarajevo etc, we have all fallen prey to the spectacle created by war, we are all interested in being engaged in it on one way or another, but for most people this doesn't involve rushing down to our local recruiting office to sign up, but joining in the spectacle by watching television news coverage, playing war themed video games, etc etc. Video games and tv allow us "heightened experience" of war in the words of Baudrillard, but to quote him again, they make us "profoundly indifferent" to it, as we cannot fully recognise the full horror of it. During and after 9/11, news coverage showed us images of the planes, people hurling themselves from the towers, people being pulled from the reckage, and we had a much more detailed experience of what it looked like from the outside than those involved, but we could not empathise properly with those involved, as we were not. The news coverage was deliberately dramatic in order to capture our attention and stir up our emotions, but unless we were involved, we can never begin to imagine to full horror of it. At the end of the video I have posted, Gary's soldier is killed - he is able to engage in warfare without any of the blood, gore and devastation that you would expect: the game just resets itself whenever he dies. Modern warfare for the modern man. probably not unlike Iraq, as it was a war of technology, and there was very little enemy to enemy combat.

The Tazer promotional video on youtube encourages thought - who are they marketing the product to? hopefully just the military, and not civilians, as although it is not life threatening, it could have serious consequences if it were available freely. obviously it gives maximum control without being life threatening, but this raises questions as to whether the military would go around tazering all who appeared threatening. As the video states, it is often difficult to distinguish the enemy from innocent civilians so could tazering everyone actually give them the answer?

In relation to my earlier blog on this topic, I think this blog which I borrowed from blogger roynelson completely sums up our lack of freedom in a culture where we are supposed to have freedom of speech, but we actually don't have anything like that...

"To save my entire blog on BLOGDRIVE,I deleted the pictures of the dead children,killed when Israeli tanks 'misfired' and bombarded the village of Beit Hanon.

Would you have ?"

This lecture was not the first time I have heard this term, and I have been hearing it with incresing frequency for some time. I know that it will only get worse. I am surveyed by higher bodies before I have even left the block where i live - as I get in the lift, I am faced by a camera. If I go down the stairs, another camera. As I walk through the foyer, another camera, along with a real security guard, who is as much there to protect others from me as he is to protect me from others. As I walk to my car I am caught by another 2 cameras - 1 in the door to my block and another on the roof. They can also monitor when I am entering and leaving the building by the information stored on my fob key, notably this only contains my name and flat number, but it is enough information for any would be criminal to get credit in my name or such like. Before I have even got into my car to start my day, I have been caught on 8 cameras. The cameras in and around the block work well enough in recording my actions, but when vandals are damaging my car on a repeated basis, they do not work.... thats justice for you...
The fear of being caught doing something wrong has turned me into a nervous wreck - although I am never doing anything wrong, or rarely anyway all the cameras make me feel like I am, although they are there for my protection... supposedly anyway. At speed cameras, I slow down to 25mph to avoid a speeding fine. If a policeman drives past me, I ease off the accelerator and position my hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel to avoid being locked up for dangerous driving. On a recent shopping trip to Asda for some batteries and wrapping paper, the alarms went off as I walked out. After muttering to myself that the stupid checkout operator had not removed the tags from my items, I handed them over and it was confirmed that they had in fact been detagged, and it must have been someone else who had set off the alarms. I attempted again to walk out, and again the alarms went off. After four attempts at walking through, I was met with an uncontrollable urge to strip, empty my bags and scream at them to check the security tapes to prove I had not been shoplifting. Under the scrutiny of the employees, other shoppers and of course the omnipotent security cameras, I began to feel like a criminal and wondered whether I was in fact a kleptomaniac. I'm not of course, but pressure makes you do funny things.
In my gap year, I worked for Orange, and on my wing there was a tiny little man who sat in front of a huge computer screen wearing giant headphones, without a mouthpiece. He never talked, just sat and listened. After a few enquiries, I found out that he was monitoring calls randomly throughout the company. There was also the added pressure that my line manager would be listening to at least 5 of my calls each week. The pressure was enough for me to become a perfect customer services representative with impeccable manners and sales technique, as sales were soemthing else which was monitored, with a different system. Looking back, I don't know why I strived for perfection, as I hated my job, but then again, I did not want to lose it either.
The idea that our lives are controlled by everything from security cameras, to the documenting of our spending, emails and telephone conversations to being monitored in our jobs, and also the ways in which public spaces are now designed in order to give higher powers maximum control in times of disorder brings about an uneasiness in me. I cannot believe that any of this is for my own protection, but it is for the protection of those at the top of the social hierarchy - the rich and powerful, not ordinary working class folk minding there own business and doing nothing wrong. A need for protection is measured in the amount of power and capital a person possesses. I, possessing neither, would probably be last in line for any sort of defence should I need it.
Being part of a surveillance society has also resulted in increasing uneasiness towards certain races and groups. Its a case of tarring everyone with the same brush. In the case of the 2 muslim men who were asked to leave a holiday jet, I beleive that society has gone mad, and needs to find someone to blame in order to help them relax. It doesn't matter to the holiday makers on that plane that 2 ordinary men were victimised because of the colour of their skin, as long as their straw donkeys got home.

proves the point that absolutely anyone can create music. I could no doubt pick one of these up and create decent sounding music.

(this) "collection of high quality 3D animation and trip visuals will blast your into a new form of visual and audio enlightenment.
"Dr. Spook has compiled some of the most breathtaking psychedelic videos ever created. Each of the artists are well known for being leaders in this mystic and provocative visual art form. The music and videos complement each other perfectly inducing a state of euphoria with no other additives needed!"

the 90 minutes of 3D animation on this DVD are presumably supposed to replicate the effects of certain drugs on the watcher. It is interesting to note that it has been called a "visual art form" - as it mentions in the quote above, the music and video have been perfectly synchronised and the creator has obviously painstakingly spent time creating both the audio and the video using a computer. digital art in the form of video and music.

This film raises some interesting issues for me. Firstly, the issue of our foods being genetically modified to become another food, for example the Nacho flavoured banana which Clara offers Adam at the start of the film. For me, our foods should be left the way they are, i.e. banana flavoured bananas and nacho flavoured nachos. Flavours and textures of existing foods should not be messed around with in my opinion.
The cloning issue interests me because theoretically, we would never die if we had the technology and permission to clone people after death, but as The Sixth Day suggests they would, would the clone possess the same characteristics as the original person? Memory and experience must surely be impossible to clone as they would not be contained within cells, as the physical matter of the human is... I feel the clone would just be a shell of the original person without any memory or experiences of the original human being.
The film also deals with issues such as gene modification. The idea of being able to make a human being without any flaws or potential genetic diseases seems in theory to be a good idea - we could limit the damage done to families by genetic diseases and prevent the suffering of thousands and thousands of people who could potentially be born with a genetic disease. would I do it? possibly, but I couldn't possibly say unless I was in that situation. The use of gene modification for trivial things such as amending hair and eye colour is going too far - I would want my own child to have the hair and eye colour it was genetically predisposed to have, not the designer or fashionable one I had picked out for it. Babies are not dolls to be played with, they are living beings who should be treated as such. Growing up as a designer baby would present all sorts of problems - would they be bullied for not being allowed to develop naturally? what if the growth process went wrong in the womb and they became deformed because of the cloning process or what if, because of the cloning, there were some terrible implications for the childs health in it's future? These would all be issues the child and it's parents would all have to live with.
Even HSBC bank are exploring the issue of cloning with the idea that all are entitled to their own points of view - according to HSBC, 55% of taiwanese people believe that cloning has already happened. In the advert, it is a boffin who has apparently been cloned and he arrives home after work to numerous versions of himself - in my opinion, one of me is enough for anyone - more than one would result in a complete lack of individuality and identity.

Digital photography is not something I have ever really thought about properly until this lecture. Even while I take photographs on my digital camera and the camera integrated into my mobile phone, I beleive I am taking photos of a moment in time, but then when I really think about it, it wasn't that at all. What I am actually doing most of the time is setting up a false moment in time, rather than just spontaneously recording one. Looking through the photo albums on my laptop and my mobile, there are very few pictures of real moments - there a few of me being pushed off my inflatable crocodile into a river, i.e. the before, during and after moments; that was a real moment in time and not one that I would like to remember, but it is in my album, mostly for the amusement of other people. There are a few very blurry pictures of my boyfriend in goal, as the ISO on the camera does not go high enough to compensate for the movement. It is quite hard to look at those moments and think about what he was actually doing, as most of the pictures are just blurs of black and yellow across the screen. I have pictures of my friends' wedding, but there is not one picture which is of a real moment in time. The actual ceremony was not photographed, nor the signing of the register or the cutting of the cake, but I have numerous pictures of them posing signing the register and posing cutting the cake. This lecture has made me wish I'd took more pictures of the actual moment in time, rather than the simulated one.
Digital photography has made me much more vain, because I know I have the power to retake or amend my photos if i'm not happy with them. Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I had to go back to an old 35mm camera and actually wait for my pictures to be developed and then scan them and start editing. And what would I do with the actual real object? Obviously I would probably bin it, as I wasn't happy with it in the firt place and had turned it into a digital image anyway...
The debate around the validity of photography is very real in my opinion. The onset of digital photography, or even photography in general (with the aid of computer editing technology) means that there is a huge abundance of anonymous images which can be passed of as either being photographed by yourself, or which you can pass off as yourself. Through the internet, people can invalidate photography by using photographs which do not represent themselves in any way shape or form. I could take any of the pictures from my mobile, transfer them to my laptop and then edit them so I could become a (seemingly) 6' brunette with brown eyes living in New York. Those of you who have actually seen me know that reality is closer to 5' blonde, blue eyes and living closer to New York in North Tyneside than NYC. This would be comparable to the works of Pedro Meyer, where he creates images of miraculous things in everyday life.
Patricia Picinini's 'The Young Family' presents a disturbing image to the viewer. Because of the completely realistic look of the animals(?) in the picture, we are forced to consider whether it could be an actual reality or not. When we look at the image we think about the advancements in technology which have enabled the use of pig's organs for human transplant and this forces us to wonder whether this has gone further than just body organs into a complete pig/human hybrid. New Media Cultures like the internet, multi-media messaging enabled mobile phones and other mediums mean that this fake image could be cirulated as reality within a matter of hours, if not minutes. The relief we feel when we find out that the animals (in the broadest sense of the word) in the image are imaginary is immense. Digital photography has the means to indoctrinate people in ways not unlike the one's in Orwell's 1984 - truth could be rewritten in minutes if the need arose using only a computer and basic photo editing software....

"The body is obsolete" (HAHAHA) Stelarc http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
Stelarc's ideas for the post human body are quite ingenious in the ways that they strive to make the human body much more technologically efficient than it currently is, using technologies that are currently for use outside the body... Stelarc's idea for synthetic skin is probably quite marketable to those with enough capital and a need for a skin which can absorb oxygen into it's pores rather than the it having to be taken into the respiratory system by breathing, which no doubt actually wastes energy. The technology of synthetic skin is probably quite useful to certain groups of people, maybe sportspersons for example, as they would not have to perform the physical act of breathing, which would maybe save them some energy which can then be put into their sport and improve stamina? Also they could peform for longer, if their skin was able process chemicals and turn them into nutrients, because this might eliminate the need to stop for food and water, and would surely be an ongoing process.... maybe Stelarc could invent a system which could be fitted inside the body which would eliminate the need for sleep, which would make humans as efficient as robots and uber-employable!
Orlan has been using her body and plastic surgery since 1990, and she uses her operations as performances, rather than private surgical procedures. For her, the process of plastic surgery to enhance beauty is as important as the finished product is for others who go under the knife.
She is using her face as a canvas in order to create her own image of beauty using works of art as the ideal picture of beauty, but she does not have any regard for what the rest of humanity considers to be beautiful. As a feminist she is trying to show the ideals of beauty are not perfection but impossible to achieve. Orlan beleieves "the acceptance of one's natural self to be a primitive concept, given the technology of our time, and therefore does not believe that nature must be abided." (http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm)

Orlan