User:Emily/NOTES for Own Research & Resource 10
NETWORKS WITHOUT A CAUSE 2001
Geert Lovink
chapter 8
P134-145
ONLINE VIDEO AESTHETICS OR THE ART OF WATCHING DATABASES
- We no longer watch films or TV; we watch databases.
- snack culture of the multitasking prosumer: watch a clip and move on
- what dose it mean that our attention is guided by database systems?
- searching vs finding (why has searchability become become such an essential organizing principle)
- ?? why do we encourage a personal relationship with the relational databse? Are we really in dialogue with the Machine?
- Are there editors in the background recommending the "most popular videos"?
- Cultual awareness of how algorithms function is still a long way off
- Italian artist Albert Figurt, Notre Dame Cathedral
- Beyond the often moralistic critique of gadget fetishism and the praise of technology-free watching, we need to upgrade and focus our "ways of seeing"(Jon Berger) and ways of describing the composition of our contemporary culture
After the Fall of the Grand Narrative
- Attentive watching and listening give way to diffused multitasking
- the moment we sit behind a computer, we are susceptible to ADHD
- we must take database-watching seriously, not only just dismiss it as "consuming video clips" That the way how people occupy themselves
- The interface inherently keeps us going and going, and the clip chain continues forever
- Allowing oneself to be led by an endlessly branching database is the cultural constant of the early twenty-first century.
- Time is the message. As Maurizio Lazzarato writes in his Videophilosophie, "video and digital technology machines, like the spirit, crystallise time." With online video we consume our own lack of time.
- The continuous technological revolutions have the dangerous potential to numb us. B-S-B: Boredom-Surprise-Boredom.
- so far there is no evidence of a dialectical turn form quantity into quality.
- It is time to leave behind "reality video," ehich is the candid camera level of spectacular television, and move toward new and yet unexplored forms of dialogical visual culture.
Proactivity and Social Viewing
- video existed on the internet in 1997 with the launch of proprietary video format Real|Video.
- What made youtube successful: internet start-ups accelerated agin in 2005; the number of users with a broadband connection grew, a combination of built-in video players inside browsers and a liberal attitude toward "sharing" (read:copyright violation of TV content)
- Henry Jenkins's uncritical appraisal of "participatory culture"
- In the early 1970s, Jean Baudrillard defined mass media as "speech without response" These days, messages only exist if they are indexed by search engines, retweeted with shortened URLs, forwarded through emails and RSS feeds, liked at Facebook, recommended on Digg, and, receive comments on the page itself. Media without response is now unthinkable.
- The core of the YouTube project lies in this invitational gesture.
- The added layer of social viewing is what makes video today different from the film and television age.
- To study online video is to study this intimate aspect of affect, no the theories of commercial repackaging that underlie common rhetoric about remediation.
- The social is the core constitutive element of contemporary video practice and not some leftover redundant noise surrounding audiovisual content.
- Similar to other social networks, online video sites assume that we have an incestuous desire to be just like our friends. The essential fact of postmodernity - namely that we seek difference, not similarity - has not (yet) persuaded the Web 2.0 entrepreneurial class.
- Today multitasking is the essence of the media experience, rather than an unintended side effect.
- With the spread of video-phones and MP4players, the film-video-TV complex travels with us, becoming part of the intimate sphere of the Self.
- The intensity of solitary watching while on the move, in bed, at the kitchen table, or the home theater plasma defines the online video experience.
- In this danger-free communication zone, itself barely out of diapers, we relive our childhood while aware that unknown companies watch over our shoulders. The controlling power is as anonymous as we believe we are.
- This is the dilemma of radical YouTube criticism: why spoil the fun of million of people who've long known they are intimately watched?
Online Video Criticism: Video Vortex
- how to interpret the online Given
- 3min upload constraint produced the ongoing tendency to upload short and ephemeral content ( YouTube's database style, special effect of its early technical limitations)
- user-generated censorship (self-regulatory model)
- YouTube's search engine is the world's second largest after the Google search engine
- What aesthetic strategies do artists like Natalie Bookchin and Perry Bard employ when integrating the "video of the crows" into their work. Their question is strategic: how can user-generated content transcend the individualized level of the remixing citizen who reappropriates culture, and make sense of it as a co-created coherent art work? (digital craft)
- "Beyond the fragments" was a demand formulated by UK socialist feminists Robotham, Segal, and Wainwright in the late 1970s during the rise of new social movements and the decline of unions and parties.
- How can a multitude of individualized expression be brought together in to a compelling zeitgeist image? vs Can a multiplicity of data express the unity of art?
- "technical images" coined by Vilém Flusser
Video Foresight
- seesmic
- will online video remain a jukebox item passed from one social network to the next?
- the attention war
- The more visual material aligns itself with users by facilitating "clouds of meaning" (as YouTube and Flickr do), the more they will dominate future media markets