Transcript New and Converging Technologies

New and Converging
Technologies
New and Traditional Media Coming
Together.
Dr Marianne Hicks
• Print – Newspapers, Magazines, Books, etc.
• Audio - Radio
• Audio-visual – Television, Cinema.
• One-way – encoding-decoding model
• Educational Ideal
• Representative, Discursive or Advocacy?
• Fourth Estate
“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but,
in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate
more important than them all. It is not a figure of speech,
or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, .... Printing, which
comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent
to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable.
..... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole
nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with
inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.
It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or
garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue
which others will listen to; this and nothing more is
requisite.”
Thomas Carlyle “The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns [Lecture V, May 19, 1840]”, On
Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History available in Project Gutenberg
[http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/heros10.txt] Accessed 25 February 2008.
New Media = Digital Media
• Information and Communication Technology
– Internet
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Social Networking Software
YouTube
iTunes, MySpace
LAN and gaming environments
Web 2.0
– Mobile Phones
– Satellite TV
New Media =
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Convergence
Participation (Participatory Culture)
Production + Consumption = Prosumer
Concentration & Dispersion
“The fragmentation and proliferation of
media, and the consolidation of media
ownership – soon to be followed by a
wholesale unbundling. The erosion of mass
markets. The empowerment of consumers
who now have an unrivaled ability to edit and
avoid advertising... A consumer trend toward
mass customization and personalization.”
Steven J. Heyer, President, Coca-Cola, quoted in Henry
Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2006, 68.
History of the Internet
• 1965 – the first networked computers – two of
them, and they constantly crashed.
• 1969 – ARPANET - Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network – text based – funded by the US
Military.
• 1974 – The term ‘internet’ was first used.
• 1980s – An increasing number of networked
computers worldwide and first ISPs (Internet
Service Providers) emerge for the
commercialisation of the web.
• 1990s – The internet emerges as a space for
commercial activities.
Convergence
“… technological, industrial, cultural and social changes in
the way media circulates within our culture. Some
common ideas referenced by the term include the flow of
content across multiple platforms, the cooperation
between multiple media industries, the search for new
structures of media financing … and the migratory
behavior of audiences who would go almost anywhere in
search of the kind of entertainment experiences they
want. Perhaps most broadly, media convergence refers
to a situation in which multiple media systems coexist
and where media content flows fluidly across them.
Convergence is … an ongoing process … and not a fixed
relationship.”
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2006, 282.
Convergence = one screen
“The current platforms: television, radio, newspapers,
can all converge on screen with broadband on the net.
And we're looking towards perhaps having one screen
which can do everything. I know people have talked
forever about convergence, about having screens all
around your house and you can operate them, you'll call
up your television and your radio, which by the way I
already do in Britain on one screen, but next you'll also
have the internet on that screen too. I think that's where
we're heading; I think you'll get everything, virtually
everything, through the net.”
Roy Greenslade on ‘The Media Report’, Radio National,
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/22
36747.htm
Traditional media (newspaper,
radio and television corporations)
meet new media (online news
sites, with multimedia – words,
images, sound bites and video)
Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and Eventful
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication (RSS)
How new media is used to create
change in society:
• Monitoring:
– Online identity (your boss and Facebook)
• Societal changes:
– Digital divide (distance between the ‘haves’ and have
nots’)
– Access to information (full participation)
• Collective intelligence:
– Wikis
• Identity construction:
– Social Networking Software (Facebook & MySpace etc)
... technology is always, in the full sense, social. It
is necessarily in complex and variable connection
with other social relations and institutions,
although a particular and isolated technological
intervention can be see, and temporarily
interpreted, as if it were autonomous.
R. Williams, Contact: Human Communication and
Its History. Thames and Hudson, 1981, 227.
• Uses of New Media in the West:
– Challenge to traditional news media corporations
(citizen journalism & Blogosphere)
– Challenge to traditional entertainment corporations
(BitTorrent, Napster & piracy)
– Reducing the ‘tyranny
of distance’ (Skype, Twitter)
www.gapingvoid.com
– Access to information
(Google & Wikipedia)
– Building online
communities
(Facebook &
MMORPGs)
• Uses of New Media in Africa:
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Building online communities (Facebook, MMORPGs)
Cell Phone Banking (Wizzit)
Open Source Software (Linux Ubuntu)
Cell Phone Text Messaging (Getting news out - Zimbabwe)
Sharing information (Freedom Toaster, Creative Commons)
Building offline communties (Township TV, Digital
Doorway)
It’s less a question of ‘catching up’ than one of using
our context to shape our uses of the new media to
which we have access. It’s about adaptation.
Fractals
Not an add-on – a paradigm shift
Using New Media in the Classroom:
• New Media to access Traditional Media:
– Newspapers online (SAMedia; SAPA; U.S. national
newspaper abstracts)
– Internet Radio (both online and traditional radio
broadcasts; podcasts)
– Online TV (SABC News; video podcasts; other
databases)
– How else?
New Media to access New Media:
Internet, Cell phones, alternative infrastructure
(Digital doorway, Township TV)
Outcomes:
• Lowering the threshold to civic engagement
• Creating Global Citizens
• Ethical and Responsible Participation
• Create the critical capacity to understand the way
in which media shapes perceptions of the world
Core social skills for Media Education
• Play – the capacity to experiment with your
surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance – the ability to adopt alternative
identities for the purpose of improvisation
• Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct
dynamic models of real world processes
• Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and
remix media content
• Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment
and shift focus as needed to salient details
• Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact
meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and
compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility
of different information sources
• Transmedia navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories
and information across multiple modalities
• Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize and
disseminate information
• Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities,
discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping
and following alternative norms.
From Henry Jenkins, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory
Culture”, 56.
• Creating wikis
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Activities?
Recognising each other’s knowledge
Group Ownership and vandalism
Using hyperlinks to connect ideas
Collective intelligence
• Creating class and individual blogs
– Individual Ownership and plagiarism
– Interaction
– Clarity of expression
• Play as a means of learning (gaming)
– Communication, self-confidence, problem solving, logical thinking, lateral thinking
etc.
• Media Literacy and critical understanding
– Being critical of ‘professional’ looking sites
• Cell-phone access
– Adapting our material for their platform (libraries and coursework)
• How else?
Using the ideas of New Media offline:
• Applying Web 2.0
– Collective intelligence and the Wiki model.
• We all have some knowledge to contribute, we all share
in the knowledge produced collectively.
– Participatory Culture
• We learn more if we are involved in the making and
doing.
• Prosumers – those who both produce and consume
cultural artifacts.
– How else?
“Youth do their best work when engaged in activities that
are personally meaningful to them” – Jenkins, "Confronting
the Challenges of Participatory Culture”, 59.
• How do we teach youth to evaluate and appraise their own
work and actions?
• How do we help them to situate media (produced by them
and others) within the larger social, cultural and legal
context?
• Connectivity will expand and get cheaper.
• We need to prepare our students for a world where
connectivity is increasingly the norm, not the exception.
• Participation is key.
Activities
• Creating a wiki on ‘Wikipedia’
– Use the tools for Media Education to construct a wiki
on the website ‘Wikipedia’.
– Where do we go to find out about Wikipedia?
– What is it? Who is it for? Is it a useful source for
education? What level? In what capacity?
– What are some of the problems with Wikipedia?
Authorship? Reliability? Vandalism?
Sources
Carlyle , Thomas , “The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns [Lecture V, May 19,
1840]”, On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History available in Project Gutenberg
[http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/heros10.txt] Accessed 25 February 2008.
Eglash, Ron, African Fractals in Buildings and Braids, TEDtalks, Available:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals.html Accessed: 29 Oct. 2009.
Eglash, Ron, and Toluwalogo B. Odumosu. "Fractals, Complexity, and Connectivity in Africa." In
What Mathematics from Africa?, edited by G. Sica, 101-09. Monza: Polimetrica International
Scientific Publisher, 2005.
Greenslade, Roy, on ‘The Media Report’, Radio National,
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2236747.htm
Jenkins, Henry, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robinson, and Margaret Weigel.
"Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century."
The John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation. Available:
http://newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf Accessed: 29 Oct. 2009.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide: NYU Press, 2006.
Williams, R., Contact: Human Communication and Its History. Thames and Hudson, 1981.