An Adam Curtis TV series is always something of an event, and his new work, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (starting tomorrow on BBC2) promises to be a welcome addition to an already impressive resume.
His previous works include Pandora’s Box (1992) – on political and technocratic rationalism – The Century of the Self (2002) – Freud and mass-consumerism – and The Power of Nightmares (2004) – radical Islamism and American Neoconservatism.
Curtis’s distinctive style combines critical insight – typically delivered in a calm, reassuring voice – with a highly creative use of imagery and sound. Though hardly unique, his technique of mixing archive footage of reportage and popular culture with eclectic soundtracks pre-empted web-based mash-ups by years, and the effect is still disturbing, compelling and at times, hypnotic.
In this new work, Curtis takes on the internet, suggesting that the myths of utopianism and democratisation that evolved from ecology, systems thinking and the hippy counter culture, are serving to contribute to the illusion of social connectivity and the perpetuation of a global capitalism.
Much of Adam Curtis’s previous work is available to view at thoughtmaybe, and to download from Internet Archive. Hopefully, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace will be added sometime in the future. In the meantime, it will no doubt be available for viewing in the UK on BBC iPlayer. Adam Curtis also blogs at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/
If you’re not familiar with the ongoing Animate series of videos from the RSA, they are well worth a look. Whilst these short animations, based on excerpts from RSA lectures, may be fairly rudimentary, the visual annotation provides an innovative way of disseminating key concepts and ideas. I particularly recommend watching Sir Ken Robinson’s on changing paradigms if you have even the slightest interest in education.
In the latest Animate, Steven Pinker references Hollywood movies and everyday scenarios to explain the role of innuendo as a language-based negotiation of culturally defined social relations. He describes the dual purpose of language, that is; (i) to convey content, and (ii) to negotiate one of three specific ‘relationship types’, which anthropologist Alan Fiske defines as dominance, communality and reciprocity. He explains how the perceived appropriateness of a social interaction can be acceptable or anomalous to each relationship type, and is characterised by whether or not there is a mutual understanding. He goes on to argue that the visibility of this shared knowledge has profound consequences for political uprisings (which has particular resonance with current events in North Africa and the Middle East, and the role of social media.)
Hew and Hara (2007) present reciprocity as one of six motivators to sharing knowledge in online environments. Reciprocity can be direct – between a provider and a receiver – or generalised, indirectly by a third party (Ekeh, 1974). Whilst personal gain refers to increasing one’s own welfare (such as recognition, reputation and self-esteem), altruism increases the welfare of another person. Hoffman (1981) views group commitment or ‘collectivism’ as a variant of reciprocal altruism, in which the individual member increases the welfare of the community by identifying with and valuing a collective vision or purpose.
Pinker’s ideas introduce a fresh perspective to these types of discourses into the understanding of online knowledge exchange and community development, and raise a number of interesting questions. How are our participation, mutuality and reciprocity characterised by the (increasingly multimodal) forms of language apparent in our social interactions on the web? And are these defined by inherent technological cultures (‘nettiquette’ etc.) or by dominant social factors, power relations and hierarchies external to the web environment?
References
Ekeh, P. P. (1974). Social exchange theory: The two traditions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hew, K. F., & Hara, N. (2007). Knowledge Sharing In Online Environments: A Qualitative Case Study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(14), 2310-2324.
Hoffman, M. L. (1981). Is altruism part of human nature? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(1), 121-137.
“Medical information has been described as no longer being bound to medical institutions, but as having “escaped” into society at large by means of media and most notably new media.”
From the age of sixteen, I have suffered from recurring headaches. Attacks last 2 to 3 hours, and occur once, twice or occasionally several times a day. The pain is located exclusively on the left-side of my head, centred behind my eye. It’s nothing like a migraine – I don’t feel sick, or get irritated by background noise or bright lights. It’s nothing like the dull or nagging pain of a normal headache, but rather like being stabbed continuously in the eyeball. Attacks have made me cry, scream, roll on the floor, and carry out irrational acts of self-inflicted injury – during one attack, I belted my head so hard against the door to my room I made a crack in it (the door, not my head). Even the strongest prescription painkillers have barely any effect.
It was initially diagnosed as sinusitis. I was prescribed antibiotics and after 2 to 3 weeks the condition disappeared. Subsequent episodes (again lasting several weeks) occurred every few months or so. Gradually the gap between these episodes increased to a year, then several years. My last episode was five years ago (and counting!) Since that original diagnosis, I’ve changed location several times and with it, my GP. None of them ever witnessed me having an attack, or really questioned the original diagnosis. It wasn’t until my most recent episode, whilst studying in Cornwall, that the doctor actually took the time to enquire more thoroughly into the nature of my attacks. He suggested I had been suffering all this time from cluster headaches (which I had never heard of before). He still proceeded to give me a course of antibiotics – for my own reassurance rather than any belief they’d help – and I endured this latest series of attacks for a few more weeks, as normal.
But the significance of this new diagnosis was that it coincided with, for the first time, my access to an increasingly populated source of information – the web – which over subsequent years has multiplied through various forums, networks and online support groups. Sure enough, everything I read online about cluster headaches, from medical reports to sufferers’ own experiences, seemed to relate very closely to my condition: the one-sidedness, the episodic nature of attacks, and the intensity of the pain.
In a quotation on Wikipedia, Professor of Clinical Neurology and headache specialist Dr. Peter Goadsby remarks:
“Cluster headache is probably the worst pain that humans experience. I know that’s quite a strong remark to make, but if you ask a cluster headache patient if they’ve had a worse experience, they’ll universally say they haven’t. Women with cluster headache will tell you that an attack is worse than giving birth.”
I realise self-diagnosis from potentially unreliable sources – not least on the web – can be irresponsible and even dangerous. In my case, it wasn’t self-diagnosis as such, rather following up on a diagnosis provided by a medical professional. But all the same, even given the overwhelming evidence, I was still cautious in questioning what I had been led to believe for many years. However, what has clinched it for me has been the emergence of a significant number of videos posted on YouTube by sufferers willing to share recordings taken of them during a cluster headache attack. Here’s a couple:
Watching these for the first time was a revelation – the rolling back and forth, the cradling of the head, the pacing up and down, the involuntary crying out – it was all frighteningly familiar. These videos and others like them hardly constitute a definitive diagnosis for my own condition, but as visual and explicit mediated experiences, they are highly persuasive. Even after repeated viewings, they bring me out in a cold sweat.
I don’t blame the GP who made the initial misdiagnosis, nor the subsequent doctors for not challenging it. It appears medical knowledge about cluster headaches was, until only very recently, largely restricted to specialists. The online forums are full of people recounting misdiagnoses of sinusitis and migraine.
I’ve been free of this for five years now, and have no idea if and when I’ll get another episode. But I know if I do, it should only last for a few weeks. Whilst I’ve suffered this over many years, I think of myself as being extremely fortunate. As an episodic sufferer, with increasingly long remission periods, my experience is insignificant compared to chronic sufferers. I cannot even begin to imagine how they manage to live with this debilitating condition on a daily basis. I only hope that the shared advice and discussion that is evident on the web provides at least some support.
Reference
Mager, A. (2009). Mediated health: sociotechnical practices of providing and using online health information. New Media & Society, 11(7), 1123-1142.
It’s a long tradition in the build-up to the Football World Cup to procure a half-decent wallchart to adorn a bedroom wall or the back of the kitchen door. Once the tournament is under way, the results, goal scorers and group standings are ritually inserted in the spaces provided (at least until England make their usual exit in the quarter finals, after which it all seems a bit pointless). Traditionally, these are newspaper or magazine freebies or, more recently, digital promos to download and print.
This year, those clever people at Marca.com, the Spanish sports website, have created a fabulous Flash-based interactive calendar for the forthcoming tournament in South Africa. It’s available in both Spanish and English versions and can be viewed in glorious full-screen. I particularly like the cross-referencing by date, stadia, team and group / stage, and I assume it will be automatically updated as the matches take place.
I get the feeling a lot of people who were actively involved in early online communities and blogging miss the relative simplicity that the smaller number of participants provided. As I commented recently on Virginia Yonker’s blog, the key is in how these were small enough to be easily identifiable and manageable. Being a relatively late adopter, I can appreciate how the affordances of current social media has enabled mass use, yet with this comes a radically different dynamic of social engagement, which is not necessarily more distributed but infinitely more populated and complex.
Many see the answer in developing Personal Learning Environments / Networks (PLE/N) and employing technology-enabled methods such as subscription and aggregation to keep up with it all. Yet does the adoption of a learner-centric network logic require us to develop aggressive, neo-liberal marketing strategies with an emphasis on self-promotion and immediacy to get noticed? Is this at the expense of the richer communication and identity formation associated with traditional modes of participation and interaction? There remains a natural human inclination to want to engage in, and become identified as a member of, communities, but how can this be cultivated in a more network-based culture?
Does this equate to a trade-off, where we embrace the advantages of an expansive engagement with wider networks and multifarious communities, or do we restrict ourselves to fewer, or even singular, localised groups?
Steve Wheeler’s list of his top 10 Web tools generated a typically popular response on his blog today, with others sharing what they are using and why. I raise the point that whilst these tools are highly effective for a range of purposes, we should not necessarily treat them as discrete technologies. In adopting a holistic view to studying the social web, I’m particularly interested in the type of emergent processes that students are developing in using these tools collectively.
I go on to comment:
“For example, writing a blog post such as this one is not an isolated activity. What are the motivations for writing it and how might they involve other social media? Attending a webinar perhaps, or reading an online journal article? Or is it in response to another blog post? And was that sourced from Twitter, or from a regularly subscribed blog via a RSS feedreader? What external resources might the post link to, or does it embed content from other sites? What happens after the blog is posted? Is it promoted on Twitter or Facebook? Does anyone leave a comment, or bookmark it? Well, you get the general idea…”
Tools come and go. Whist certain tools become culturally embedded and synonymous with specific activities, or we appropriate certain sites with specific communities, it’s the combined processes of – as Steve rightly says – connection, sharing and amplification that makes social media so powerful. Identifying these processes enables us to develop good practices, but how transferable are these as new tools emerge?
SmartMobs describes a report from the China Digital Times on the twitter mobbing of a virtual wall set up by KulturProjekte to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Using the twitter hashtag #FOTW, Chinese ‘netizens’ have bombarded the site with calls to end State censorship of the Web.
Which I wonder (should the latter happen) would have the greatest historical significance; the fall of the Beriln wall or that of the Great Firewall of China?
SmartMobs describes a report from the China Digital Times on the twitter mobbing of a virtual wall set up by KulturProjekte to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Using the twitter hashtag #FOTW, Chinese ‘netizens’ have bombarded the site with calls to end State censorship of the Web.
Which I wonder (should the latter happen) would have the greater historical significance; the fall of the Beriln Wall or that of the Great Firewall of China?
I had assumed there was only one model of distributed cognition; that which is largely associated with the work of Edward Hutchins and which describes how individual human knowledge can be distributed across a group or network of people, tools or environments. So I was somewhat taken aback when Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University introduced four more in her lecture “How We Think” at the University of Nottingham earlier this evening. She outlined the embodied, extended, autonomous, and appropriated perspectives alongside the embedded model to which I am familiar. She then went on to explain how these are used to varying degrees by writers, artists and designers working in the digital domain; highlighting the print-based work of authors Mark Z Danielewski (‘House of Leaves’), and Steven Hall (‘Raw Shark Texts’), the electronic and interactive texts of Deena Larsen and Steve Tomasula, and an algorithmic engine from multimedia artist Talan Memmott. She discussed the roles of narrrative and spaciality (of texts / images etc.), and the temporality of embodied reading, and concluded by referring to Lev Manovich’s notion that narrative is in direct conflict with what he terms ‘database’ (i.e. that which is relational, spatial or conceptual).
I’ve started a private war on web pages and blogs with white / pale text on black / dark backgrounds. I’m sure the temporary blindness you get from jumping back to a ‘normal’ web page (i.e. one with a light background) is not healthy. Most times I come across one, I click straight out again, no matter how good the content is. I’d like a browser that forewarns me when I’m opening such a page, or better still one that automatically inverts the colours (wouldn’t that be cool!). In the right context, ‘light-on-dark’ design can be great – particularly on visual sites with little text – but in most cases, it is used indiscriminately and unnecessarily. Unless you’re a goth, I can’t think of many reasons why you should even consider it – it’s not good design, it does not promote web accessibility, and it’s not good for my health.
Yesterday Eva, my colleague in room C11, successfully defended her viva (with minor corrections) and will soon be leaving us to go back to China. We will all miss her and wish her every success. In the next few weeks, new PhD students will be taking the place of departing friends.
Although I regularly work at home, when I’m in University, I value the working environment of C11, particularly in the mix (in terms of stages of PhD, experience and fields of study) provided by my colleagues. One of the key roles of formal education is to promote diversity, and thereby expose students to different perspectives. Yet as our online learning activities become increasingly informal, self-directed and distributed, is there a tendency to choose like-minded people in our digital networks and online communities of interest / practice? How can we replicate the diversity which formal educational structures often impose?
Yesterday, Eva – my colleague in room C11 – successfully passed her viva (with minor corrections) and will soon be leaving us to go back to China. We will all miss her and wish her every success. In the next few weeks, new PhD students will be taking the place of departing friends.
Although I regularly work at home, when I’m in University, I value the social and working environment of C11, particularly in the mix (in terms of stages of PhD, experience and fields of study) that is provided by my colleagues. One of the key roles of formal education is to promote diversity, and thereby expose students to different perspectives. Yet as our online learning activities become increasingly informal, self-directed and distributed, is there a tendency to choose like-minded people in our digital networks and online communities of practice/interest? How can we replicate the diversity which formal educational structures often impose?
This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed represent my own views and not those of any institution in which I am currently studying or employed.
