Marie Wocher, Trimester 2, 2012

Marie Wocher, Trimester 2, 2012.

Description

A year ago I was doing a project about the NATO operation in Libya. To be more precise, I formulated the question »How does Google help me to form an opinion?« Because Germany didn't take part in the NATO intervention, the debate about it in the german news was quite big, and even if it was difficult for me to form a personal opinion, I was informed quite well because this topic got a lot of media attention. A year later, I was interested in the question: How do we remember? I tried to recap the events last year that attract media the most and I realized that I don't know anything about the situation in Libya anymore. I realized that my memories fade away when the Libya topic was overwritten by the next current news.

For the TP I haven't been interested in the media event itself, I was rather interested in the moment when we forget about a topic again. The moment, when it becomes silent again.

I decided to research this phenomenon within the structure of Wikipedia. When a topic is particular current and gets a lot of media attention, the activity on Wikipedia clearly increase what means that the edits of a page will increase. But after a while the edit site of a Wikipedia page will fall to a lower level of edits again.

My TP consist of three films of three different Wikipedia pages (Whitney Houston / Libyan civil war / Postmodernism). The screen of each film is split into two and shows all edits being made on the same page on two different days. The old entry is seen for as long as a new edit was made. 24 hours has been compressed to 15 minutes, whereas the proportions are correct. I compared the Libya civil war page on the day the NATO intervened (03-18-11) with the 11th of february, the day Whitney Houston died. The second animation shows all edits of the Whitney Houston page on the day she died and the day, I run the script, that was 29th of march 2012 (ideally it would be the current day). The amount of edits varies strongly it shows how quickly somebody or something is forgotten again. The third animation compares the same days like the Whitney-film of the postmodernism Wikipediapage. This is a page that is not dependent on current events and media attention. The amount of changes are on both days almost the same.

Media

Photos

Essay

Does Social Media mirror our own expectations or is it a preexisting set of technologies that we simply follow and adapt to?

• Essay 2