Dave Young - Past Research

Connections

Four of the texts which I annotated last year could be described as a base upon which my current practice rests. Firstly, Cyburbia by James Harkin provided a solid grounding for my interests in how systems mediate online social behaviour. Although the chapters Peer Pressure and The Network Effect raced through a myriad of diverse topics while only managing to explore them superficially, it presented some interesting ideas that I find I am revisiting at the moment. One point that I am keen to explore further is how responses on online discussion forums are mediated through feedback systems.

In Wendy Chun's Control and Freedom I was interested in how she described the discipline/control society models with respect to cyberspace. I would like to further explore how these two paradigms can be extended into the mediation of social interactions online, and how cybernetic theories might be used by to increase the scope of the control society.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination, Jos de Mul describes the mutability of digital information. One piece of data can be combined, edited, juxtaposed, spun in order to present a desirable narrative to an audience. Again, this relates to my current interests as it describes the mediation of social interactions online, and how they are governed by computational ideals that have emerged out of the control society.

Richard Barbrook, writing in Imaginary Futures, describes a link between the cold war history of computer technology and cybernetic theory with contemporary issues in how we organise our social interactions. He focuses on how the media creates an imaginary future with which to satisfy the needs of the society, one dominant method of doing this is in promising new technologies that will mediate social discourse.