Crowdsourcing Related Media

I want to start off by saying that although this was a good bit of information to go through, I found it all interesting and the vast majority of it worth the read/watch.  I like how some readings were focused on the good of technology, some on the bad, and some weren't concerned at all whether it is good or bad - they just wanted to discuss its implications and abilities.  Although all of this info is related, I've picked out three basic themes I thought of that I want to write about.

Also, this ended up being a lot longer than I intended...


Relation to my myth
I started brainstorming ideas for my myth/story about life and regeneration before I even looked at these readings, and I came up with this idea about evolution and posthumanism.  Basically, the kind of regeneration I was thinking of was one where we stopped singlehandedly creating and developing technology, and instead the relationship grew to work two ways: we "evolved" technology, and in turn technology began to evolve us, too.

Then I clicked on the first article we had to read, Panting for Breath on a Virtual Shore, and it was super similar to what I had come up with!  The photo on top really struck me with the quote "We are breeding a new generation of human beings who will learn more from a machine than from their mothers."  Although this article seemed a little sensationalistic at times - do teenagers really spend a total of 11 hours a day on average on the computer? Every day? - I think this idea that technology and the internet has already started to change our minds is a good point.  We always think of this futuristic world where we have computer chips implanted in our skin or something, but our mere external interactions with technology are already changing the way our brains our wired.  How our neurons interact depends on the interface we have in front of us, be it a person, a book, or a computer screen.  As Tiffany Shlain said, "Each time we were able to change the way to record reality, it changed reality itself."  And really, reality to us is just a construction of perception, which is created by our senses and the neurons firing in our brain...

The Nature of Consciousness was relevant to my myth idea too, especially because it incorporated this notion of five things to understand the universe: space, time, matter, energy, and consciousness.  I liked the idea that there are varying degrees of consciousness, even among humans.  When I sleep, my consciousness is subdued, maybe it's comparable to a rat's or something.  Maybe the Internet has some rudimentary consciousness that we don't know about yet because we have no ability to quantify it?  Unrealistic, but something fun to think about.


Vertical vs. horizontal - new order?
A lot of the articles discussed how the Internet and all of these tools that come with it are creating a new sort of forum for people to create things.  Does the Internet Make You Smarter? talks about the "endless stream of mediocrity" that all this new media is allowing into existence.  For every new invention to help humankind, 1,000 cat videos are uploaded to YouTube.  The same article points out that "every increase in freedom to create or consume media alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system", giving the printing press as an example.  I love this quote, because it's so true.  It goes along with all the stuff Shannon loves to talk about, with the Millenials coming in and messing around with old world order.

The world was previously organized vertically, with strict hierarchies and levels of quality.  Of course a movie shown in theaters is of more worth than a home video.  Or is it?  Now high-brow and low-brow content is all mixed in together from all types of creators.  Memes usurp authority by springing from origins that are usually authentically grassroot (Speaking in Memes).  Tiffany Shlain went from trying to make a traditionally structured feature film to a horizontal model and succeeded better in the latter form of organization.

Two Reasons Why the Term Crowdsourcing Bugs Me and The Myth of Crowdsourcing both talk about faults in using this structure, how it can in fact alienate people instead of lifting them up.  Myth insists that crowdsourcing only succeeds because it helps uncover individuals that can do great things, so the actual crowd effort doesn't matter anyway.  These are valid points, but I think they will become irrelevant as crowdsourcing continues to evolve, either as its own way of expression or into something else entirely.  As Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia proves, a community of over 600 people editing a website can still be considered tight, integrated, and reliable - something that would never have been possible just ten years ago.


"Media mediate relationships"
This is a quote Mike Wesch says in his two videos we had to watch.  His Web 2.0 video insists that we need to think many of our societal norms, because they are all based upon relationships that are changed by these new tools at our fingertips.  I never really thought about it this way, but its completely true.  New technology has changed humans' relationships with each other, relationships with information, and relationships with our creations (how they are finished, how they get attention).

Mike gives the example of studying other cultures that don't have all the technology we do.  Life is different, more ruled by relationships than an individual sense of self.  The introduction of new media requires people to create an external representation of themselves, which can be misleading or just plain wrong.  Although we are more interconnected in some ways, we are also more isolated because we must always think about ourselves and what we are putting out for others to see.  People are not seeing me, they are seeing the Facebook version of me.

Does the Internet Make You Smarter/Dumber? brings up some good points on how we interact with media now.  Humans are built to think in binary (as evidenced by these two articles, which both offer very one-sided views of this debate), but this is not how things in the world actually work at all.  "The web keeps us in a perpetual state of locomotion" as we are constantly Googling things, refreshing our Facebook page, posting to Twitter, and amassing all kinds of information from all kinds of sources.  Although there's always a ton of tech talk going on about making things more intuitive, when you get down to it, technology is all man-made, and it is all unnatural resources.  Although the Internet is inherently nonlinear, human brains are still built to think in a linear fashion.  Can we ever overcome this?  We are still terrible at multitasking.  The Web Video Problem talks about creating some sort of new web media that better ameliorates this problem, and I think the author is asking a similar question of media that we asked about crowdsourcing on the first day of class:  Can we ever make it so it is undoubtedly the best medium for the creation?

Finally, new media changes the relationship with our creations.  I know we have to eventually create some sort of finished product with this crowdsourced movie to send to festivals and whatnot, but I think the whole point of a project like this is that it is never actually finished.  Everything digital is easily changed, manipulated, reworked.  Speaking in Memes talks about the volatility of internet content and how things gain momentum and attention online.  The real power of the crowd is to take concepts or news items or whatever and hyperevolve them, but often that tradeoff is a shortened lifespan.  Creating something in this kind of environment comes with inherent high risk, because no matter how well-planned it is, input to it comes so quickly that it cannot be easily mediated.  But that is also what makes it interesting and dynamic.

Sacred Geometry

I enjoyed these sacred geometry readings because it made me pause and think about why certain numbers are so pervasive in our world. Three, four, and five can really can be found everywhere in language structure, classifications, science, nature, cultural norms, etc.  When we brainstormed our associations towards numbers on the first day of class, I was surprised we could come up with so many things...Most of this stuff we just take for granted and don't think about.  Like the conclusion of Chapter Three states, "You already knew all this but may have had to be reminded."  

My favorite number has always been three, but until I actually read this stuff I couldn't actually explain why.  It just felt like a good number to me.  But I am partial the whole idea of balance and thoroughness that three conveys.  Four is also balance, but it is too stable, and five is too dynamic.  I also like that the self can be expressed through the number three.  The reading talks about the ancient roots of this, but I also like psychologists Jung and especially Freud's take on it (the whole id, ego, superego thing).

Associations with certain numbers and their shapes have a lot to do with how we perceive things unconsciously - for example, the way the text describes the star as a worldwide symbol of excellence, or triangles and squares  as universally recognized forms of balance.  These archetypes work so well because they have been ingrained in the human psyche for just about as long as we have been conscious, rational, material-creating beings.  Numbers are powerful stuff.  I think sacred geometry will act well as the "glue" that holds the human and technological story elements in our crowdsourcing idea together, because people don't have to be explicitly familiar with its concepts to understand them.  Since these numbers already act to hold our world together through their ubiquitous presence, it is a topic that people can viscerally relate to, although they may not know exactly why they can do so.