Summary Recap lectures Introduction to New Media and Digital Culture/ Inleiding Nieuwe Media en Digitale Cultuur
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Course
Inleiding Nieuwe Media en Digitale Cultuur
Institution
Universiteit Utrecht (UU)
Recap lectures Introduction to New Media and Digital Culture/ Inleiding Nieuwe Media en Digitale Cultuur, English, lecture week 8, 2018/2019, first year Taal- en Cultuurstudies.
Recap Week 1: History and Role
->Teleological account of history vs. Genealogical account of history
->Remediation
->Technological Imaginary vs. Moral Panics
______________________________________
T. D.
• McLuhan
• Media=Technology (material)
• Media extent our senses
• Media transform our sensory experiences of the world around us and as such start to
determine our society and our human condition (we cannot escape them)
– 'Primitive' oral culture – Culture of literacy – Print culture – Electronic culture
• Medium is the message (not content, not intent)
– Content is always another medium → remediation
S.C.
• Williams
• Media=Technology Use (a tool)
• Media are made and used by humans
• So… media do not determine social change but humans do (agency versus causality –
Humanism)
• That “change” is more often business as usual (reinforcing dominant social, political,
economic, and cultural ideologies) → we need to be aware of this!
• If we have agency, we can also use media to our advantage, free ourselves from the
shackles of big corporations, and other powers that be (“workers of the world unite”)
Recap Week 2: Characteristics
Affordances …
1. … exist in between user and technology.
2. … thereby also offer us more than a taxonomy of essential technological characteristics
(what it affords, not what it is).
3. … offer a perspective in between TD and SC.
4. … help to characterize and compare media and consider their historical development.
___
Technological characteristics
- Digital (vs analogue)
• Data storage (electronic en compressed)
• Data access (high speed and non-linear)
• Data manipulation (remix culture, prosumer)
- Interactive - Ideological connotations (active, power, independence, choice)
- 1) Hypertext navigation (database: links on a website)
- 2) Immersive navigation (spatial: most games)
- 3) Registrational interactivity (adding: wikipedia, comments, forum)
- 4) Interactive communication (dialogue: chat, video conference)
- Hypertextual
- Non-linear connections between different units of material/files (text, image, sound)
- 1) Intertextuality and notes and bibliography
- 2) Vannevar Bush (1945): The “Memex” -> Ted Nelson (1982): “Project Xanadu”
- Networked
- Media as nodes in a larger (almost) global network, (relatively freely) accessible to
everyone, all the time.
, - Consumption: mass media → specialized supply, fragmented audience
- Distribution: centralised (one-many) → decentralised (many-many)
- Production: professional → ‘user-generated-content’ (prosumer)
- Virtual
- From incomplete reality to another/different reality (with real effects – virtual money)
- VR; (In-between) space/cloud; descriptor for a cyber/mediatised society
- Simulation
- Postmodernist: Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’ -> The Matrix (obfuscation/replacement of the
real)
- Computer simulation: Prensky -> e.g. weather simulation software (prediction/visualization/
modelling of processes)
- Simulation games: e.g. Frasca, 2001 (modelling complex rule systems)
Recap Week 3: Visual Culture (VR)
The social developments of technologies as media (B. Winston, 1999):
− New technologies have their basis in general scientific competence ('feasability’)
− From this competence, prototypes are formed ('ideation’)
− Once the prototypes become more socially accepted and find grounds for commercial
growth, they become… (‘inventions’)
Virtual as “an object to think with”
Raises questions about:
• Our reality (what is real?)
• Our perceptions of our bodily experience of our reality (embodiment)
• Immersion, simulation, representation, realism
-Immersion
- Stepping into a different (virtual) reality (more than absorption)
- Alberti’s window (1450’s)
- Creates a “virtual” space in a painting
- Continuation of physical space into virtual space
• “Environmental”
• “Head-mounted”
-Simulation
• Simulations are real things before (or sometimes even without) representing something else
• Simulations present rather than represent
• Simulations have lost their connection to an original
->It focuses our attention on how the thing models/functions (the underlying system) rather
than on what it represents/means Frasca, 2001
• And as such, it raises questions about the relationship between reality and the virtual
-Realism
• Referential → perceptual realism
• Verisimilitude: Approaches the visual appearance of our world as it appears to the human
eye
• Indexicality: Direct relationship between picture and the depicted
• Photorealism: Presentation (rather than representation) of a realistic looking image
(remediating the photo)
• Hyperrealism: Dominant aesthetic form in Disney animation films in which live action
cinema conventions are remediated and combined with more animationspecific forms
('plasmaticness’)
->CGI:
• Plays with (challenges) our idea of realism
– Illusory
– New reality
• At the same time, fascination for technological ingenuity and a sense of heightened illusion
• Normative connotation: spectacular superficiality
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