User:Marlon/selfdirectedtext

Self Directed Research Essay

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Cyburbia (James Harkin)

Chapter: Peer Pressure

James Harkin's Cyburbia links internet to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. It discusses our present internet culture and how it has transformed the way we live. The chapter Peer Pressure focuses on the effect of our peers in the second coming of the internet. Norbert Wiener envisioned cybernetics a society where we are human nodes firing off messages and adjusting ourselves to feedback in an information loop that never ends.

The internet began as a small collection of static websites, but around the millennium it grew to a web of sites populated by ordinary users. Decentralised file-sharing sites became increasingly popular: peer-to-peer communication without authority. After that came Google, eBay, blogs and finally, social networking sites. Harkin sees this mass migration to social networking communities like Facebook as a social movement. Users sign up to have unmediated, authentic experiences with their online peers, without any need for a government or control.

Cybernetics are evident in the workings of Facebook, as human nodes we are the infrastructure of the social network and our friendships make the connections. Network theorists were right all along, the relationships between people are just as important as those people themselves. The effects of sharing information peer-to-peer are not necessarily positive, it's power can be used to virally spread falsehoods online. Internet users want to communicate with equals and to have control over what they watch, read and listen to. They spend their free time observing others and exhibiting themselves. Though not always a good thing, it is easy to find like minded people online. But we are still experiencing information through an electronic medium.

Wild Images (Jorinde Seijdel)

Susan Sontag, quoted in the text, noticed a shift. A picture is no longer a keep safe, but has evolved into something that "disseminates and circulates". Banning these wild images is so difficult, because they could be made by literally anyone: the boundaries and rules of the professional news media are not set for the amateur photographer. This results in images being circulated in a very liberating and democratic way, but they're also more explicit, savage and perverse. Especially in the case of accidents, disasters and wars we've become a society that wants to "consume events" from everywhere, while they're happening. We're a very professional public: less a participant, more a recorder or a performer. We're either taking pictures or being photographed. We record events, but we also re-enact them, to the point where we, maybe not on purpose, are imitating images or at least always aware of the possibility of our actions being broadcasted.

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination (Jos de Mul)

Benjamin wrote about mechanical reproduction, de Mul writes about Digital Recombination: the 'combining, decombining and recombining' of pieces of data in a database. Not only the database as part of a computer, but also the idea of a database as a metaphor of our own experience of reality.

Databases have developed over time: from inflexible and 'flat', like a phonebook, to wiki's and other online Web 2.0 applications. Today, the computer is the dominant technology, with databases as the dominant cultural configuration. Anything cultural or natural can be recombined. Genetic experiments on animals or an interactive archive of historical photography. De Mul states that all these possibilities can bring about a 'return of aura'. Especially when users are capable of changing and sharing the content of a database, they become part of its virtuality: a performance art.