The Evolution of Memes

The Evolution of Memes




Hello all! This is my final version of my project video. I hope that I explained what exactly is a meme, gave a few examples, and then illustrated, perhaps, how the new media on the internet have allowed for information to disseminate faster than ever before, for memes to spawn and spread, and also allowing some incremental increase in control over what idea will become a meme for the "average joe".

Draft the 4th

I really like the last bit that I changed. The video has been rearranged a bit and edited. There will be a bit more editing before midnight. Methinks the Kenny Glen part might say goodbye. Let me know if anyone has any comments/insights/questions.

Did we need a third draft?

This is almost the same as the previous vid, just cleaned up a lot and with some extra audio and a few visuals added. I might try to shorten it and tighten up some of the nuts and bolts of meme creation... perhaps talking about things like the Amazon fail incident, just walking through that really quickly, a viral vid, and leaving lolcats. we'll see. The thing is, there is no magic recipe for creating a meme. They happen. Some things will make memes more likely to become viral memes than other, less infectious, memes. hrmm...

The 2nd Draft

Here lies the second draft of the final project.

Soon to be sacrificed once more to the internet re-editing gods.

Anyways, here is the 2nd draft of my vid. Comments are always appreciated.

My thoughts/questions - I'm not sure how much I like the music or my voice editing over certain parts and am also unsure about the value of the long introduction to the idea of memes. Any suggestions or comments on any part of the video, especially the paris analogy, would be greatly appreciated.

I think I will let the video be for at least one day and then review it and begin to rip it apart once more.

Thanks all!

p.s. I love the rain!

For the Next Video

So! I have some feedback for my next video. We were sitting in class today and going over videos and throwing around ideas... For my own project, I need to do more of an ethnography and tell at least one really good story. I'm thinking that what I want to do is cut out the Paris example and all of that. Then I want to fill in with lolcats as an example of a really good meme that can lead in to how they became so big, how they are everywhere, Icanhazcheezburger, and then activism with perhaps a tie with Kenny Glen and the angry lolcats. Methinks this could make the meme idea better and also keep me away from the Chocolate Rain/Tayzonday story that just annoys me (the song gets stuck in my head, and I really really really don't like that).

General notes: I need to simplify a bit and then perhaps condense my argument and make my argument louder through the use of simplification and the meme examples.

Hrmm...

Any comments/help that anyone can offer me would be greatly appreciated! oi

Video... again

That should work now. I also edited in the correct link on the previous post. *sigh*

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok. So. I just realized that the video I posted in the post immediately previous to this post has no sound. I will repost a video with sound later... I want sleep now and I don't feel like having to render a video for the 4th time tonight... Computer! Be nice!

First Full Length Vid (OH THE INSANITY!!!!)

Internet memes...


So, that is the first 5 minute video. It's a good thing that it is a first edit. I think the video itself is not horrible. It's not mind blowing, but I have not quite figured out how to get it just the way I want. I think that I will need to cut/edit the rather long intro about memes and then work more on actually building the argument for media ecologies and delve more deeply into how they are manipulated.

I ran into issues when my camera refused to turn on... That is never good and then again when I kept having to re-download programs and plugins for my computer (I had to wipe my hard drive this past week, which then requires many many many many hours of reloading programs and discovering how much you really did just lose...).

Basically, I think that this video needs to work on the argument part of itself, the part where I try to explain HOW and why do memes develop (particularly through microcelebrity; not leetspik or any such thing).

Side note, I was discouraged by the Know Your Meme videos; I thought that they were quite clever and they humorously touched on a lot of relevant topics... Translation: The vids were awesome and I felt inadequate and a bit like someone restating an already cleverly done video. *sigh*

Script ideas for the video on Memes/Temes and their evolution

So I haven’t quite decided on what I want to do for my video yet.

As my last post suggests, my project has shifted a bit and I am trying to figure out exactly how I want to organize it. I do think that the silent video can be an extremely effective mode of conveying information and I think could be awesome, especially with some of the shots that are out there. The only issue that I might find with the speechless form of the video might be that music selection, images, and written words are much more significant and thus must be more carefully thought out. If I have enough time, I would like to try to do both ways and see which one is most effective. I actually really do enjoy the video editing portion of this project and so (if I have time) would really like to try to play with that… in case you couldn’t tell by my posting of two versions of every project so far.

The basic outline of the argument looks like it should stay the same. The only thing is that I frequently like to let a project take me where it will. I like to do a lot of background research, get a lot of data, multiple songs, and several videos and sound bytes to use for the video and then sit down and try to make a video that flows together well and manages to convey some sort of argument over multiple levels. The song will be integral, but also must mesh with the dialogue of the images, the text, and any spoken word. So, the following list is a potential script/screenplay for a video, but one that most likely will be edited and changed during production.

Opening:
Blank screen – Dan Dennet voice-over “what is a meme?...”
Images – Old memes (perhaps some voice-over or clips from Susan Blackmore’s Ted
Talks) moving forward to new memes like Tay Zonday, Boxxy, Kenny Glen, Anonymous masks, Oprah image, other memes
SUSAN BLACKMORE – “the temes are becoming something different… the temes are forcing our brains to become more like teme machines…”
These are new ways of spreading memes; the internet is used to create flash-memes and memes out of regular people – MICRO CELEBRITY

HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN – track memes as they evolve over the internet
Make Paris analogy – use “Can you hear the people sing?” soundbyte as transition into modern day meme-creation and user generated content.
Twitter, Digg, YouTube, messageboards, forums, etc.
use screen shots, articles, perhaps a talking head if one is found

S. Blackmore – “temes don’t care about us. They’re just information.”
Is this really true? Is there actually a conscience behind temes?
Jonathan Haidt talking head on the collective consciousness
intro to Anonymous – images, clips of “we are everyone, no one, etc.”
-power users on Digg; Anonymous collective action
Anonymous activism; good and bad examples
Kenny Glen – screenshots of website, effects, news reel clips
- he became a meme; he also became a new example of “does anonymity even exist on the internet?” (***Lead in to cryptography part…)

Ideas for the Film

So, my project has shifted directions... again. I am going to try to avoid any use of 'code' from now on. I have been told that referring to code as a way of encoding information gets confusing when speaking about the internet (which has a base-code of ones and zeros, etc. that create the structure). I am now working much more closely with memes and the evolution of them and the microcelebrities attached to them across the internet mediascape. In this instance, I will try to see how the mediascapes and the different media ecologies are manipulated to create these flash-celebrities. So, I must now track down the internet trail of Tay Zonday, Boxxy, Kenny Glen, and others... oi.

For my video, I am going to try to collaborate with our meme-er/language of the internet person and try not to overlap with her project too much while still showing a certain amount of continuity. I believe that the Parisian warren of roads metaphor will still work for this, and in fact will work for this, and so will be using something French Revolution-esque. It would be factually incorrect, but using clips from productions of Les Mis will be useful for the message that I am attempting to portray.

So ideas:
(hopefully memes already introduced... if not ->) What is a meme?
Micro-celebrity memes on the internet - examples of Boxxy, Tay Zonday, Kenny Glen (images and videos of them with Talking Head or me voicing over it...)
Rewind! How did they become this?
Paris metaphor, explore how ins-and-outs are used
Follow one or more micro-celebrities through Digg to YouTube, etc. and their evolution into memes.
Conclude with Kenny Glen as an example and lead in to cryptoanarchy and the ability to be truly anonymous on the internet...

The Potential Paper - unrevised

I/Encode: Manipulating Media Biases on the Internet


How do we codify information, thoughts? For millions of years, the most common way of codifying information and transmitting thoughts was through speech, through oral tradition. With the advent of written traditions, there was a perceptual revolution with a shift from the ear to the eye as an organ of language processing (Postman 12) Plato recognized this, that the transition from an oral transmission of knowledge to a written one created an entirely new way of conceptualizing, of codifying information, and this new medium then began to create a hierarchy of knowledge acquisition. As Meyrowitz states, “the skill and learning required to encode and decode messages in a message determines, to a large degree, who in society can use the medium to send messages and who has access to the information the medium carries.” (Meyrowitz 74) Reading proficiency takes years longer to acquire than does speaking proficiency in a given language and written works can then further be separated by the complexity and specificity of terms that only persons with specialized knowledge can easily decipher. Meyrowitz, McLuhan, and Postman wrote major treatises addressing the change in media accessibility with the advent of television and electronic media, most admittedly simplifying the contrasts to those between books and television. We have now passed the television and entered an entirely new realm of communication media, with the internet providing new means of communication seemingly every day with new programs and ways of codifying information and communication.

The internet itself is written with a base code that restricts what is possible to create on the code’s platform, however the possibilities for the communication structures that can be built on that platform are myriad. Within the last five years, communication media and information sources have proliferated with alacrity over the internet. “Older” media such as instant messengers, email, Wikipedia, blogs, and message boards have either been absorbed into new structures or have evolved into something barely recognizable from their nascent forms in terms of both respectability and ease of use. “The skill and learning” required to encode and decode messages on these electronic media have become radically easier to acquire and thus the media more accessible to a much larger population. New media such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, mySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and even permutations such as RSS feeds have made more information and more communication media incredibly more accessible. It is no longer truly necessary to “distinguish between the inherent complexity of specific ideas and processes and the superimposed complexity of the means through which we encode and describe them.” (Meyrowitz 79) With an internet connection and minimal literacy, ideas, pictures, videos, and texts can be shared with literally millions of people with limited knowledge of how the actual inner workings of the media function.

However, with these new media ecologies on the internet, new methods of manipulating information are coming to light. Linguistic anthropologists have written about the media biases of oral communication media in Sherzer, Bauman, Ben-Amos, and Hymes, looking at performance and discourse. Analyses proliferate on the biases of the written and the typed word, as well on the effects of the telephone and the internet. Now we must look at these new electronic media on the internet are manipulated and how the very code is used and manipulated to publicize very specific ideas and appeal to select sensory biases. The collective known as Anonymous has effectively exploited the both the sensory biases presented by online text and media, but also the loopholes written into the media’s code. One could argue that groups like Anonymous flash mob the internet to get their ideas publicized through view-counts, but that is unlikely. The internet has often been likened as a place, a physical location that one must navigate. As Lessig points out in his book Code, a loose analogy can be drawn between internet collectives like Anonymous and the revolutionaries of the French Revolution, the ones who took advantage of the infrastructure of Paris to revolt (Lessig 91). The revolutionaries in the 18th century had an extreme disadvantage when compared to the governmental forces; the government had the absolute power with far more man and gun power. However, the students recognized the fact that Paris was a warren of small roads and alleyways with no real central boulevards; the small routes were extremely easy to blockade and hold with minimal personnel and firepower. The French revolutionaries recognized the bias in the city's infrastructure and took advantage of it (which is why Paris’ infrastructure was restructured in 1853 to include wide boulevards and multiple passageways to make it impossible for insurgents to take control of the city). The same can be said of Anonymous and their manipulation of the architecture of the internet media’s code.

Anonymous does not write the code of the media it uses; most of its members are NOT hackers or elegant code writers. They have critically looked at the current infrastructure of the internet and, recognizing the areas open to manipulation on Digg, YouTube, Twitter, del.icio.us, and others, have been able to effectively publicize their causes and mobilize masses. As Steve Cross put it, they are using the digital code to rewrite social code and to get action. They manipulated the vagaries of the internet code to get Oprah Winfrey to host a television special based on a comment about "9000 penises" posted on her website’s messageboard. They have also supplied the information that directly led to the legal investigation of Kenny Glenn and his brother after Glenn posted a video of himself abusing a cat. A website has been created, http://www.kenny-glenn.net/, that details the cat abuse and serves as a nexus for not only information on the case, but also as a launching point for people to take action against the cat abuser and to share their own creations. Anonymous also got the cat-abuse video mass media coverage via instigating an internet movement that exposed the abuse video and the personal information of Kenny Glenn.

The architecture of the internet can be envisioned as perhaps an imaginary warren of interconnected information streets, roads, back alleys, tunnels and byways. There is no one huge highway connecting it all; Google and other search engines might be considered the highway connecting the smaller routes, but they function more as a map or as a teleporter. To continue the analogy, manipulating groups like Anonymous are not building new streets or connecting the roads; they are, instead, like graffiti artists on steroids (not “Hackers on Steroids” – FOX News). They are the ones who would plaster the sides of buildings and alleys in major cities with posters advertising what they found important, or perhaps spray-painting their messages.

This analogy for what Anonymous does also fits in with Meyrowitz' argument on cultural lag, published in his 1986 book "No Sense of Place" wherein he talks about the change in society that occurred with the advent of television. Meyrowitz argues that a subset of a population will embrace a new technology much quicker than the rest of the population, necessarily causing some conflict between the two groups. He was referring to the 1950s arguments with the TV as the "devil" and a subversive influence on the day's youths. Similarly, the internet media have most fully been embraced by the younger generation and, as Lessig and others point out, the people most likely to generate and influence internet content are the teens-to-thirty-somethings that use the internet (especially the high school and college students with relatively more "free" time on their hands). Anonymous seems to be made up primarily of members from this age subset and their manipulation of media seem to be the new evolution of that age subsets rebellion in previous years; from the French Revolution's university students, the 1960s and 70s political protesters, graffiti artists and visual protesters all tend to fall in this age bracket.
Already, the biases, the ins-outs-twists of these information alleys, and some of the more overt form of manipulation are becoming public knowledge. Robots, spiders, offline readers, and automatically reloading pages to boost ratings and views on YouTube videos have gotten much coverage from news media already. Anonymous has been linked to the micro-celebrity rise of figures such as Boxxy and Tay Zonday. Beyond YouTube, Digg has also been the subject of much controversy. Some estimate that 56% of the frontpage content on Digg is generated by less than 100 power users and as much as 25% of that content is generated by only 20 users (randfish); this from a site that has stressed user-generated rankings and sold itself as a democracy. Another bias that Digg has is the "bury" option; it is anonymous, unaccountable, and burying a story is much more powerful than voting against it. With the anonymity of the “bury” option it is difficult to track, but there have been rumors of people forming "bury brigades" to effectively jettison stories on subjects of which the brigadiers do not approve.

The code, the groundwork, of these media ecologies have been susceptible to manipulation by the people who use but do not write it. Can users take control of the online code to rewrite social code? Will the codewriters rebel? Is there a threshold at which the creators of the structure, of the code, lose control to the users OR the code evolves to serve some function other than the one originally intended by the writers? The codewriters have already rewritten code when users began to use it for "unwanted" purposes; Digg deliberately deleted/buried an article on how to rip files (making users angry by their bowing to the "man" and foregoing what users considered to be Digg's mandate) (BBC News). YouTube limited video lengths in 2006 to 10 minutes after too many copyright violations were occurring with posts of full TV show episodes and movies. More recently, YouTube has begun to remove videos that loosely violate copyright law. Videos of people and bands performing covers of copyrighted songs are being taken down, as well as videos with a copyrighted song playing in the background (for example, a radio playing a copyrighted song playing in the background of a home video) (Arango).

Copyright issues necessarily become part of the argument when speaking of internet media such as YouTube, but the code itself is slowly but surely being rewritten. The internet media are incredibly fluid in terms of code; new media are being developed and modifications to the base code of many platforms occur more and more frequently. User generated content is becoming more and more the norm, rather than the exception, and internet users are learning how to find the shortcuts and back-alleys written into the code almost before the code is modified. The new electronic media have changed the way in which we must conceptualize the codification of information. Information is fluid; we no longer need to “distinguish between the inherent complexity of specific ideas and processes and the superimposed complexity of the means through which we encode and describe them”(Meyrowitz 79). The new media are not restricted to the limitations of spoken, written, or televised media. The internet media can combine all of them or none of them and anyone can be a generator, an encoder, of a message. The encoding of information on the internet is constantly evolving to be more accessible to both readers and writers of the code and the exploitation of the media comes from the speed at which the new media are learned and mastered.



Sources
Arango, Tim. “Rights Clash on YouTube, and Videos Disappear.” New York Times. 23
Mar. 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23warner.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=youtube&st=cse

BBC News. “DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion: Attempts to gag the blogosphere
from publishing details of a DVD crack have led to a user revolt.” BBC News. 2 May 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6615047.stm

Cashmore, Pete. “Digg and the So-Called “Wisdom of Mobs”.” Mashable: the Social
Media Guide. 10 Jan. 2006. http://mashable.com/2006/01/10/digg-and-the-so-called-wisdom-of-mobs/

Hung, Tony. “ZDNet Not Immune To The “Bury Brigade”.” Deep Jive Interests. 9 Dec.
2006. http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/12/09/zdnet-not-immune-to-the-bury-brigade/

http://www.kenny-glenn.net/

Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social
Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

randfish. “Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content.”
SEOmozBlog. 20 July 2006. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-100-digg-users-control-56-of-diggs-homepage-content

Weinberg, Tamar. “An Open Letter to Kevin Rose.” techipedia.com. 7 Sept. 2007.
http://www.techipedia.com/2007/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose/

The Presentation to Be

So, I was working on my presentation yesterday and finally had an epiphany. I had read all of de Zengotita's Mediated and Lessig's Code and was listening to all of the presentations that my classmates had made the day before (http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=SxK0wJv6xrDT) when something clicked. Lessig had made a reference to the French Revolution in Code, classmates occasionally referred to the internet as a place, and all of a sudden it fit together.

I want to look at the media ecologies, how the new media are used and manipulated to publicize very specific ideas. One could argue that groups like Anonymous can flash mob the internet to get their ideas publicized, but I do not believe that to be the case. In my mind, a loose analogy can be drawn between internet collectives like Anonymous and the student "rebels" of the French Revolution, the ones who took advantage of the infrastructure of Paris to voice themselves. The students in the 18th century had an extreme disadvantage when compared to the governmental forces; the government had the absolute power with far more man and gunpower. However, the students recognized the fact that Paris was a warren of small roads and alleyways with no real central boulevards; the small routes were extremely easy to blockade and hold with minimal personnel and firepower. The French revolutionaries (think Les Miserables) recognized the bias (if you will) in the city's infrastructure and took advantage of it. The same can be said of Anonymous.

Anonymous does not write the code, most of its members are NOT hackers or elegant code writers. They have critically looked at the current infrastructure of the internet and, recognizing the areas open to manipulation on Digg, YouTube, Twitter, del.icio.us, and others, have been able to effectively publicize their causes and mobilize masses. As Steve Cross put it, they are using the digital code to rewrite social code and to get action. They manipulated the vagaries of the internet code to get Oprah Winfrey to have a special on "9000 penises", they also have caused a cat abuser to get arrested after he posted a video of himself abusing the house cat. Admittedly, Anonymous is not a one dimensional "good" group. They are probably best likened to the trickster gods of myth; the ones who till trick and manipulate people to teach them lessons, the impart morality, or to make themselves laugh (for the LULZ) - look at Nordic myths of Loki or of SW Native American myths of Coyote and of the Trickster.

Now that I digressed a bit, I suppose that I envision the internet as a bit of an imaginary warren of interconnected information streets, roads, back alleys, tunnels and byways. There is no one huge highway; Google and other search engines might be considered the highway connecting the smaller routes, but I see them more as a map or a teleporter. To continue the analogy, Anonymous is NOT building new streets or connecting the roads; they are, instead, like graffiti artists on steroids. They are the ones who would plaster the sides of buildings and alleys in major cities with posters advertising what they found important, or perhaps spray-painting their messages.

This analogy for what Anonymous does also fits in with Meyrowitz' argument on cultural lag, published in his 1986 book "No Sense of Place" wherein he talks about the change on society that occurred with the advent of television. Meyrowitz argues that a subset of a population will embrace a new technology much quicker than the rest of the population, necessarily causing some conflict between the two groups (think of the 1950s arguments as the TV as the "devil" and a subversive influence on the day's youths...). The internet has most fully been embraced by the younger generation and, as Lessig and others point out, the people most likely to generate and influence internet content are the teens-to-thirty-somethings that use the internet (especially the high school and college students with relatively more "free" time on their hands). Anonymous seems to be made up primarily of members from this age subset and their manipulation of media seem to be the new evolution of that age subsets rebellion in previous years; from the French Revolution's university students, the 1960s and 70s political protesters, graffiti artists and visual protesters, etc.

That leads me into the "where does this leave us" question. The biases, the ins-outs-twists of these information alleys, are already being exposed and some of the more overt form of manipulation are becoming public knowledge. Robots, spiders, offline readers, and automatically reloading pages to boost ratings and views on YouTube videos have gotten much coverage from news media already (also from Anonymous - Boxxy anyone?). Digg has also been the subject of much controversy; it is estimated that 56% of the frontpage content on Digg is generated by less than 100 power users and as much as 25% of that content is generated by only 20 users; this from a site that has stressed user-generated rankings and sold itself as a democracy. Another bias that Digg has is the "bury" option; it is anonymous, unaccountable, and burying a story is much more powerful than voting against it (there have been rumors of people forming "bury brigades" to get rid of stories about things that the brigadiers don't like). Those are two examples.

So where will the code go from here? Can users take control of the online code to rewrite social code? Will the codewriters rebel? Is there a threshold at which the creators of the structure, of the code, lose control to the users OR the code evolves to serve some function other than the one originally intended by the writers? We've already seen the codewriters rewrite code when users began to use it for "unwanted" purposes; YouTube limited video lengths in 2006 to 10 minutes after too many copywrite violations were occurring with people posting full TV show episodes and movies and Digg deliberately deleted/buried an article on how to rip files (making users angry by their bowing to the "man" and foregoing what users considered to be Digg's mandate).

yo necesito trabajar

yo no ablo espanol, pero no quiero escribir de DigiEth. Tristesse.

Ca serais interessant a ecrire la plupart de mon blog en francais. Ce n'est pas extremement difficile et il n'y a pas beaucoup des personnes qui lit ce blog et peut le comprendre. Oi.

So... update. I have been busy like a bee (not necessarily with the class) and am trying to finish both Code and No Sense of Place, as well as following the evolution of Tay Zonday, Boxxy, etc. The rise, the fall, the etc. I like the et cetera part of the research.

For the presentation that I must make shortly, I am trying to focus my thoughts into some form of coherency on the basics of media ecology theory and then get a decent handle on at least one example of an idea/person who was publicized through multiple media to "blow up" and become both a meme and a microcelebrity. Examples of that are Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain and Boxxy, to name two.

Research methodology

So I already kind of covered this in the last post, but my research methods are going to be heavy on the traditional style. I'm going to try to get a strong background in the theoretical background surrounding media ecology, specifically about electronic media and then apply those theoretical models and adapt them to what I see happening now. For the "field work" side of things, a lot of observation, lurking, and interaction on Twitter, blogs, etc. are going to be required.

If I can get a good enough sense of what is going on, my ultimate goal is to follow Neil Whitehead's example and try to test what I have learned about the sensory biases and ecologies to then make a message I see well-publicized. I need to look through Whitehead's article again, as well as examine the ethics of this idea, but if I deem it ethically upright I think that it could add validity to any conclusions I find. Or I could hopefully find a thread and track the evolution of it as Anonymous pushes it to the forefront of the web.

Simply put, research begins with media ecology theory followed by exploring the new ecological domains on the web, and only then will "participant observation" and message creation take place. Interwoven throughout this all will be attempting to track how Tay Zonday or Boxxy or any of the others were pushed into microcelebrity or destroyed by people like Anonymous. That should give me some excellent hints into the biases... Also (I forgot to mention), looking at code will be included in the theory research (specifically Lessig's work...).

My attempted Lit. Review about new media ecologies (Twitter, Digg, etc.)

This research attempts to uncover the biases inherent in new electronic media and then to explore how those biases are exploited by groups such as Anonymous to make their message heard above the rest. Over the last ten years, the internet has been beset by tens of new forms of media, new ways of communicating. Ambient intimacy has been heightened through the use of Twitter and the Facebook Newsfeed, not to mention blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and any of the other new media sites. Each of these new forms of communication essentially has created new media ecology, with unique sensory biases and loopholes written into their code. Anonymous, as a whole, has learned the ins-and-outs of most of the common media and has used this knowledge to increase the exposure of what they deem important. I hope to learn how each media platform functions, the biases written into the code, and then how Anonymous has learned to manipulate these loopholes.
As of this moment, there is not much formal research on platforms such as Twitter, et al. The media themselves are too new. However, there has been much written in the field of media ecology. As Casey Man Kong Lum mentions in his research on the history of media ecologies, new media change our sensorium; the manner in which we comprehend and construct our world and the internet is a multi-media environment that has different languages emerging, pictures, videos, music, vlogging, blogging, fanfiction, and hundreds of different ways of expressing oneself. Authors like McLuhan, Meyrowitz, and de Zengotita have looked at the effects of media (television in particular) on society and then how the media shape and become the message. As de Zengotita states in his book Mediated, "what counts is the code - digital or DNA, both are susceptible (and subject) to mediation, to human control of what it expresses". The message truly is in the medium.
Continuing on in the realm of published academics, authors such as Lawrence Lessig have written extensively on the future of code and its legalities. He details how to develop credibility and identity on the internet as well as exploring some of the new opportunities that internet code affords people in terms of expression. Lessig’s book Code is one of the newer published sources on code and new media; it will serve as a good reference for my exploration on exactly how the new media function. C-SPAN also recently interviewed the co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, quizzing him about many of the complaints of Twitter’s biases and the accusations that Twitter is used by terrorists; this interview gives an insiders description of one of the central new media that is being used.
The published literature is limited by the very newness of the media that I wish to explore. The media have not been in existence long enough to have a wealth of scholarly articles written about them; ergo I will be using the work of media ecologists like McLuhan, Lum, Meyrowitz, de Zengotita, Spitulnik and others to learn the theories of media ecology and sensory biases and effects of the various media. It then turns to academes such as Lessig to discover the finer points of code and biases. All of this will serve as grounding and a baseline research for a further exploration into the new media. The C-SPAN interview with Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams (http://cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-15634) and research into complaints about Twitter, Digg, and other media sources will become the key pieces of my research. I am looking at understanding the ecology of these new media and how they can be exploited, specifically the medium and NOT the message that Anonymous broadcasts. To confirm the validity of my research and understanding, I might then experiment with getting my own information publicized in the same ways as Anonymous (using my knowledge of how the code and biases function to boost the visibility of a message). This topic is fairly under-researched simply because of its novelty, but it has lots of resources available for study and past academic work to refer to concerning other media.


C-SPAN interview with Evan Williams http://cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-15634

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: the Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. http://books.google.com/books?id=0Xx5Hm8M5g8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=no+sense+of+place#PPP1,M1

Lum, Casey Man Kong. “Overview of Media Ecology.” http://www.scribd.com/doc/12284025/Overview-of-Media-Ecology-by-Lum?secret_password=1gb0osm8bchhw52a43sq

McLuhan, Marshall -> collected works concerning media

De Zengotita, Alexander. Mediated. http://books.google.com/books?id=XqAyGwAACAAJ&dq=de+zengotita+mediated

Spitulnik, Debra. “The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities”

Lessig, Lawrence. Code. http://books.google.com/books?id=xTyn4Zt3AKEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=lessig+code

New Topic! Media Biases and Context...

So for those of you who read the previous posts and had a vague idea of my project, forget that entirely. I am shifting in a new direction and will be studying the various platforms that anonymous people use and, more specifically, how groups like Anonymous manipulate the biases and loopholes in media like Twitter, Digg, etc. to make their videos/ideas viral and extremely widespread and publicized. This will involve understanding how the media themselves work; learning about the code and what inherent sensory biases the platforms hold. I will not need an extremely thorough understanding of the code itself, because Anonymous and anonymous users don't actually write the code; they exploit the weaknesses and strengths of each pre-fabricated communication system (context) to maximize the strength of their particular message. My goal is to understand what they understand and then to explain how/why they do it. *nod*

So far, the readings that we have used will actually be very helpful to me. The readings on media ecology and media biases will be very helpful to me. I am going to be re-reading my notes on those articles (see older posts), as well as researching more into both media ecology, communication theory, code, and context (linguistic anthropological papers and communication systems research should be coming in handy).

(Un)fortunately, since I had already begun researching for my previous topic, I now have a fairly decent grounding in the gradual evolution of the 'mediated self'. I have finished the first half of No Sense of Place by Meyrowitz (see below post) as well as the complete Mediated by de Zengotita. The essence of Mediated was a continuation of Meyrowitz' book, but much more contemporary. His basic argument was that "you are completely free to choose because it doesn't matter what you choose. That's why you are so free. Because it doesn't matter."

De Zengotita's book is an argument that we have become so comfortable with dealing with reality through something else that essentially everything is a performance and there are infinite OPTIONS available at all times (and reality's opposite=options). Where my new focus comes into play is in his statement: "what counts is the code - digital or DNA, both are susceptible (and subject) to mediation, to human control of what it expresses". That is my new project in a nutshell. Looking at how Anonymous, etc. look at all of the codes for the media on the internet and manipulate them to CONTROL what is expressed, what is advertised, what becomes viral.

So why do we study this? De Zengotita quotes Bezos as saying, "the physical world is a wonderful medium, and it's not going to go away." The 'real' world has become another type of media and, for many, control of the internet communication media can control enormous parts of culture. Look at memes, at pop culture, the meaning of 'cool', and myriad other culture-shaping tidbits. The internet pervades our lives and the ability to manipulate the media of the internet gives enormous power and sway to the ones who hold the ability (e.g. Anonymous - why else would Fox News, etc. cover them??).

Now, I get to outline a further plan of research - I hope to research more about the history of media ecology, the effects new media have had on culture (see McLuhan, Meyrowitz, etc.), and then try to find whatever I can on current media phenomena like Twitter, Digg, Diigo, etc. I watched part of an interview with the founder of Twitter on C-SPAN the other night, and it was obvious to me that not even he truly knows of the future of his company and of his code. It's all new, and it's all different. As De Zengotita said, "this whole technology thing has just started, but it's accelerating at a tremendous rate."

I could not agree more. We are on the tip of the iceberg. As Dr. Wesch mentioned in his Web 2.0 video, we have to reconsider a LOT of things. We no longer think purely linearly if we are trying to be rational. The electronic age is here and it has opened up new doorways for expressing thought, communication, and community. How do the media that have begun to develop shape these new ideas, how are they forming, how are they evolving, and how are people using them?

Tim Finan et al. wrote an article entitled "The information ecology of social media and online communities" which was published this past fall in AI Magazine. He and his cohorts specifically looked at blogging, which is not truly what I am interested in, but he did have a great poing: "As the web continues to evolve, we expect that the ways people interact with it, as content consumers as well as content providers, will also change. The result, however, will continue to represent an interesting and extravagant mixture of underlying networks--networks of individuals, groups, documents, opinions, beliefs, advertisements, and scams. These interwoven networks present new opportunities and challenges for extracting information and knowledge from them."

http://find.galegroup.com.er.lib.k-state.edu/itx/retrieve.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale(en%2C%2C)%3AFQE%3D(KE%2CNone%2C13)media+ecology%24&sgHitCountType=None&inPS=true&sort=DateDescend&searchType=BasicSearchForm&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&searchId=R1¤tPosition=1&userGroupName=ksu&docId=A186225627&docType=IAC


Lance Strate wrote a short review of McLuhan's work http://find.galegroup.com.er.lib.k-state.edu/itx/retrieve.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale(en%2C%2C)%3AFQE%3D(KE%2CNone%2C13)media+ecology%24&sgHitCountType=None&inPS=true&sort=DateDescend&searchType=BasicSearchForm&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&searchId=R1¤tPosition=16&userGroupName=ksu&docId=A130975645&docType=IAC
He wrote: "And it is here that McLuhan introduces his famous aphorism, which is generally considered axial in media ecology: "the medium is the message" (pp. 17 ff.). Simply put, it is the idea that the media or technologies that we use play a leading role in how and what we communicate, how we think, feel, and use our senses, and in our social organization, way of life, and world view."

So, books to read/finish and authors to peruse:
Marshall McLuhan
Innis
Meyrowitz
Michael Silverstein
Debra Spitulnik
De Zengotita
Lawrence Lessig (specifically "Code")
etc.
And watch the full C-SPAN interview with Twitter founder...

Any further suggestions, comments, help would (as always) be appreciated... Good Night!!!!

Context Collapse and the New Mediated Self

For this lovely reflection post, the first few chapters of Joshua Meyrowitz' book "No Sense of Place" and Dr. Mike Wesch's article "YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness and Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam" were read.

Following the ideas presented in the media ecology articles, Meyrowitz' book reflects on the impacts of new media on societies and especially electronic media. "No Sense of Place" was published in the 1980s and was meant to address the social impacts of television. Meyrowitz points out that, at the time of publication, almost all work concerning television and new media were not about the medium but about the message that it conveyed. The "medium is viewed as a neutral delivery system", which is not true. Each medium has its own biases concerning the significance of space, time, and physical barriers as communication barriers. They create new social environments that reshape behavior in ways that go beyond the specific products or messages delivered.

The "medium is the message", to quote McLuhan. The changes in media as electronic media have evolved have enabled new ways of communication, the possibility to move away from linear rationality as enforced by pure text, and new types of self-awareness and reflection. The new e-media have changed both social environments with things like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other media that encourage "ambient intimacy". There is also a visible "cultural lag", wherein some parts of society and culture embrace the new media and are thus "ahead of the rest". Therein lies the underlying suspicion and distrust of the internet. Some might argue that only some people are using the internet and the new media evolving electronically. For certain, not everyone uses/posts to YouTube, /b/, 4chan, fanfiction.net, twitter, or facebook and the fact that not everyone has become acculturated to these new-fangled gadgets is quite possibly one reason for all of the skepticism and dislike that is aired about such things - people fear what they do not know/understand... somewhat understandably.

Dr. Wesch's article emphasized one particular new medium, that of YouTube and the vlog. The message sent by the medium was one of context collapse and then the embracing of the new black-hole of context. The vlogs allow for new ways to reflect on who/what you are, while others can watch you free of other's expectations to react or respond. Wesch mentions a perceived loss of community with this networked individualization, and I'm sure that that is true. However, what I got out of both articles is that the internet and all of the possibilities it affords people in terms of new modes of expression, reflection, and culture are still very much so in infancy and waiting to grow/evolve. These new media reshape culture and institutions (see Wesch's video Web 2.0), but new media are constantly being introduced.

Does this new media and the context collapse under the weight of infinitely possible types of context foster Anonymous/anonymity? I think that one could argue that the new media have provided for a context collapse and a major shift in the form of new media; the social structures, mores, and culture are still evolving and attempting to "catch up" with the conundrums that these new media of communication are presenting to the world, mostly free of charge. I think that it will be interesting to see what happens with the internet and the various NEW media that will be introduced; what institutions and cultural modifications come into existence because of them. This is a whole new world. Electronic media are allowing for new ways of thought and more possibilities for contexts, self-reflection, organization, et al.

Who knows what will happen next?

Is the internet the new small town? Two articles concerning Media Ecology and the internet

The two articles that I read for this blogpost, pgs 28-39 of "Notes Toward and Intellectual History of Media Ecology" by Casey Man Kong Lum and "Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy" by Clive Thompson both treated the internet as a new forum, a new place, a new ecology for social interactions.

The first article, the excerpt from Lum's book, tries to give a brief history of the study of media as environments or environments as media (one definition of media ecology). How environments affect people, language used changes interactions, and how communication changes when the media of communicating changes. New media change our sensorium; the manner in which we comprehend and construct our world and the internet is a multi-media environment that has different languages emerging, pictures,videos, music, vlogging, blogging, fanfiction, and hundreds of different ways of expressing oneself. Each different physical/symbolic characteristic of a medium of communication has its own bias and those biases and media change society. For example, the introduction of literacy diminishes the importance of the elder and that elder's experience of knowledge; they no longer have a monopoly on knowledge and that has a profound social impact. The internet has accelerated the changes that have occurred. Interestingly enough, the segment we read did not really hypothesize on how the internet media would change the society. That was found in Thompson's article.

"Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy" by Thompson talks specifically about the use of Facebook newsfeed, Twitter, and Flickr. The idea of microblogging that creates and "ambient awareness" wherein "little snippets [of information] coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of friends' and family's lives... a pointillist painting." This was then related to how text messages sometimes feel more intimate than a phone call, in the same way that sitting next to someone yet not particularly talking can be more intimate than forcing a conversation (living together = intimacy). I definitely understood that. Ambient messages presented by Facebook Newsfeed and Twitter are ignorable; they aren't as cognitively demanding as emails and do not demand any response and merely are read at the leisure and want of the reader. It allows for people to have many more "loose ties" to people, while not expanding the number of "deep ties" a person might have. The article essentially argues that the Newsfeeds and Twitters of the internet have caused a return of small town life, of an era wherein everyone knows everyone else's business (at least in their social circle). They have destroyed/diminished the 'anomie' that many feared would form in people with the internet. It's merely another media change.

The Int'l Herald Tribune article argues that Twitter and Newsfeeds eliminated the ability to create one's own identity on the internet. Perhaps this is why groups like Anonymous have formed and anonymity seems to be growing in prevalence and popularity/attention in newsfeeds in recent years.

Thoughts...

A brief history of cyber-culutre analysis?

So, I just finished reading David Silver's article "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000" (http://www.scribd.com/doc/9525177/Silver?secret_password=2kj8wcye7gt62iokofhh). It basically gave a very brief overview on the evolution of ethnographic/cultural research that has taken place in the 90s to 2000. Read with Neil Whitehead's more contemporary piece, it is interesting to see the threads evolving and continuing betwixt the works.

In terms of gender relations, it is interesting that both Silver and Whitehead mention the freedom that cyberspace allows women (no physical fear/boundaries/body image). Silver mentions a woman who learned to accept a recent limb amputation through creating a one-legged RPG character and entering into a cyber relationship whereas Whitehead explicitly mentions sex/sexuality without danger of rape or "toxic" relations. It also is interesting that Silver's article and Whitehead's both mark the internet as being predominantly male.

Speaking solely on Silver's article and the brief history of cyberculture research it gave, I wonder how applicable it is to the modern internet. He mentions Howard Rheingold's work on community building in the internet, Sherry Turkle's study of identity, and several other scholars' works on gender issues, feminism, identity, etc. but there seems to be a distinct lack of information/research mentioned concerning violence, abusive language, or anything remotely like "trolling". I wonder if the internet was too nascent for the researchers to have noticed this phenomenon, or if perhaps the author merely looked at the more 'positive' aspects and had not read much on the negative side...

The most valuable thing (the MVT, if you will), that I gleaned from this article is a sense of what has already been studied. What kinds of topics can I expect to find at least preliminary research and what topics have been covered thoroughly, but perhaps are worthy of having new research-life breathed into them due to the evolution of cyberspace. I seem to be gravitating towards the creation of identity anonymously and then what people choose to do with their anonymity... Sherry Turkle has already written an entire book on the topic of cyber identity and I know that others have covered it as well, but the article was excellent in giving a broad overview of what people studied in the internet's first decade as a truly public-accessed communication medium.

I feel like I should go find Turkle's book and at least skim parts of it as well as to search for more research on identity, anonymity, et al. because now I know that someone has already laid the foundation and created the groundwork to make this project both academically valid and publicly appealing...

oi.

the fig-leaf of “scientific observation” - reflection on Neil Whitehead's "Post-Human Anthropology"

"the fig-leaf of “scientific observation” can no longer cover the phallus of ethnographic desire"

Perhaps my favorite quotation from the entire piece. "Post-Human Anthropology" is a paper by Neil Whitehead explaining the reasoning behind his decision to do participant-observation/observing-participant ethnographic research on how sex and violence are approached in cyberspace. He recognizes that, like Hine in her article, the old/traditional methods of doing ethnographic research no longer work. The traditional subjects have disappeared; how does one approach a culture that is "both geographically unlocated and by definition uncannily disembedded or distinct from localized cultures?"

Whitehead decided to form a band, Blood Jewel, with the express purpose of generating aural/visual content to post on the internet and elicit responses to the work - essentially becoming his own subject in an 'autoethnography' focusing on violence/sex as represented in the fairly anonymous realm of cyberspace. Whitehead had noted that "in the realm of cyberspace it is only through active participation that there is anything to observe at all. In short, in order to understand
desire we must become desiring subjects ourselves."

Whitehead had done research on sexuality and violence in the cultures of French Guiana and Brazil, recognizing the dearth of research on these topics as well as their evolving role in "western" and cyber society. "Western sexuality itself has necessarily become more disembodied and immaterial in a sexually toxic and physically dangerous social world. The explosion of on-line sex sites, ranging from commercialized pornography and camera chat rooms to person-to-person dating and “swinger” sites, all represent a new realm of sexual experience and subjective engagement. Highly visual, masturbatory, and anonymous the possibilities for safe-sex make such cyber-sexuality, or “outercourse,” a credible alternative to dangerous intercourse with “real” people. Nor is this just a framework for desire; it is also enacted on a massive scale, suggesting myriad ways in which sexual experience has become radically detached from the physical...
cyber-life and its digital subjectivities seems to stimulate and offer opportunities for the expression of both sexual and violent desires. As Freud notes, the “uncanny” occurs where the accepted structure of a world is violated, “when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred” (Freud 2003: 150), and so to challenge the “accepted structure of the world,” which clearly has no adequate narrative for either contemporary violence or the sexual, the realm of cyberspace becomes a particularly fruitful context in which to blur such boundaries and perhaps stimulate better intellectual understanding."

This is particularly intriguing for our research on anonymity because Anonymous and anonymous persons on the internet do tend to gravitate towards hyper-sexual and hyper-violent content. The posts and identities presented seem to be more steeped in a language and culture reflecting a more violent sexuality than is the norm in "real" life. Cyber life has allowed for "safe" sex and expression - Whitehead notes that his Blood Jewel site has more female fans than male, hypothesizing that the freedom from physical bounds allows women to be more expressive and free with both sexual and violent ideas without fear of rape or other retribution. Which is intriguing because the prototypical image of an "anonymous" user or member of Anonymous is that of a hetero, white male. A friend pointed out that our supposedly neutral, unmarked or anonymous cyberspace is in fact heavily, wearyingly normed as white (male, straight) able-bodied and middle class; what does that mean for people who aren't those things?(online I can be whoever I want to be, so long as I'm just like you).

In regards to our research on anonymity on the internet, this article is a good starting point to look at perhaps why the anonymous posts tend toward violence and sexually suggestive/explicit content. It also poses some interesting questions in terms of our research ethics. As Whitehead remarked, "ethnographically my actions are
ethically acceptable because they are based on that authentic artistic goal. Nor are such transgressive artistic acts undertaken as a means of experimenting with others lives, because it is my own experience of this project that is the auto-ethnographic subject of study. If I were to attempt to research individual users as “informants” on the processes and dynamics of MySpace, then the relation between on-line identity
and off-line social identity would be all important and lead directly to the ethically fraught issues of how much masking of identity and purpose could be legitimate for the ethnographer."

So, how should we move forward with researching people who are only united by their anonymity? Can we become "anonymous" ourselves and elicit information, ethically, for our own work? Where do we draw the line.

Just some thoughts to leave this post with:

- "the concept of identity has become highly problematic in anthropology, for in asking the question “who is what?”, if we have not been greeted with a recalcitrant silence,25 then we have received the reply that “we are not who you think we are!”" Whitehead

- The pornography industry generates $12 billion dollars in annual revenue—larger than the combined annual revenues of ABC, NBC, and CBS. Of that, the Internet pornography industry generates $2.5 billion dollars in annual revenue.

- "power-relations of technological competence and ownership become a form of neo-colonial dominance embedded in the social and cultural life of the post-colony."

- "violence is always more than its material appearance, that part of the instrumentality of violence could be its endemic and persistent affects on imagination and subjectivity"

- "Making sense of other people is never easy, and making sense of how other people make sense can be very difficult indeed." Keith Basso (1979)

Readings... reflections?

On Christine Hine's Virtual Ethnography -

This was a good starting point for me to read. I knew that we were attempting to create an 'ethnography', but I had not thought to critically analyze how ethnographies were collated previously. I feel like this chapter of Ms. Hine's book was written in a similar vein as Prof. Wesch's Web 2.0 video. He said that we would have to rethink a lot of things, and that is essentially what Ms. Hine is saying in reference to ethographic work. The internet is a completely new form of media that allows more static forms of text to exist as well as more fluid text (chat rooms, message boards, etc.), videos, and file sharing. New communities are formed based on shared interest and are in no way, shape, or form bound or constrained by geographic location. Language is not even a barrier overly much because of instant translators that can be installed as "plug-in"s. Ms. Hine's examples are a bit dated (her book was published in 2000 - before the advent of YouTube, for example), but still remain true.

For our project, it made me think of how exactly are we to go about this. For my project, I find it entirely too easy to see myself falling into the role of an "armchair anthropologist" and perhaps not thoroughly embracing/participating/observing anonymity on the internet. But perhaps I already am by being a "lurker". It makes me wonder how we are going to be able to get "informants", or if we should mostly throw that idea away and rely on message-boards and publicly posted interactions amongst anonymous people on the internet - or should we try to become our own informants? A lot of the questions that I though of while reading this chapter were the same, or at least similar, questions that I had when we completed the IRB training. It's one of those conundrums where we have to figure out not only what applies to us, but how or even if we should attempt to follow the semi-standardized form of ethnographic research? Ms. Hines final 10 points touch on this, but I think #10 is the most relevant - we are doing a "virtual" ethnography (meaning a pseudo, not-real-world, or some other definition type of ethnography). interesting points...

Yochai Benkler The wealth of networks

Definitely sensing a theme here. This article, I believe, is defending the internet as merely a medium. It is not a community/social destroyer or creator. It is what it is and a lot of the negative reactions to its use are similar to the ones raised every time in the last hundred plus years when new connective media has been introduced. The printing press, telegrams, morse code, telephones, television, and now the many forms of the internet are met with fear because they do/have destroyed society as it was known. To quote R.E.M., "it's the end of the world as we know it" and then to quote the TV show Life, "it's like living in the future". Each new technology has quite literally changed the world, how people organize, and how communication and communities are created. Benkler seems to be pointing out that there may be negative aspects, but his overall argument is that the internet is majority positive. I think that it's too early and too simple to call it one thing or the other. It simply is.

With regard to our research, the Anonymous group and anonymity seems to feed into the 'anomie', social deconstruction argument presented in Benkler's chapter 10. At least, it does at first. Yet as Howard Rheingold points out, even those without names or explicit identities seeked to form a community on the internet. They do things for the lulz, they lurk, they protest; the Anons are part civic activist and part bullying thrill-seeker anarchist. It's fun because, as Hine pointed out, it is a virtual reality with different rules, different social mores, and a different society. I think what Benkler did not point out is that the internet is not merely an extension of a community's day-to-day life; the internet forms its own reality with different "ethnic groups", communities, religious ideas, social mores, ideas of justice, humor, language... everything.

Video flim-flammery (second embedded video magic)

Anonymity, Morality, and Identity


This is the entirely new project trailer. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it... of the music...
hmm...

The remake of the original is:

Anonymous changes to morality...



on a side note, I do believe that I actually like the name of this video better. Perhaps I will rework the name of the previous vid., along with its music...

2nd Draft of the Video...

So, remaking a video is surprisingly difficult. I wasn't sure where to go with the first video I posted, so I played with that one for a while and then created another video entirely from scratch. I don't know how I feel about either one. I don't know if either truly touched on what I wanted to say - both had elements that were there, but I am unsure... In any case, both are uploaded to YouTube and see the next post (above) for the links.

The completely new one has more talking and different clips in it. It, perhaps, has more of the actual ideas that I want to touch on in it, but I think the video quality is not as good as the original trailer (or the remake of the original...).

My brain feels a bit fried, so I shall leave the post here. Feel free to comment on anything... or not?

some ideas that came out of my abstract musings

Why do people deliberately shed the ties and links to their traditional "identity" in favor of creating an identity that essentially exists in a vacuum for an assumed limited amount of time? Anonymity in the past has been used to preserve the purity of artistic perspective, to publish ‘unfavorable’ or inflammatory opinions, or to merely hide the identity of the writer. The internet has allowed anonymity to be accessed by anyone with an ISP. The facility of adopting anonymity has created entirely new communities and groups on the internet that are bound or freed by their very lack of ‘nonymity’. How does this change how people view morality? Do they still hold to their society's moral code, or do they abandon it? Do they embrace hypocrisy; do they try to make the world better?

The very idea of anonymity eliminates most types of accountability that society might ascribe to any actions or ideas posted or taken by anons, which many feel creates an incredibly corrosive, an incredibly dangerous situation for the health of society as we, as humans, have known of it for generations. However, we have seen anonymity take off and flourish in many different directions. PostSecret and Anonymous/4chan/etc seem to be different sides of the same coin. One tends to use anonymity to share, comfort, create community while Anonymous tries to act as a pseudo-vigilante and as a somewhat sophomoric hedonist who derives pleasure from the plight of or attack on others, and also to create a group (if not a community). Both are made up almost entirely of people who choose to create an anonymous identity and then to create ties and links to other “anons” via either PostSecret or 4chan type of sites. The fascinating thing is that their anonymity has allowed them to create any identity they wish, yet they still seek some sort of community.

Anonymity has distinct power in generating an identity completely other and mostly divorced from the "real" identity of the person - in fact, some people call their "anonymous" or adopted personas as more real than their originals... Often the adopted personas become an exaggerated form of a facet of the physical person’s named identity and character, exploring the feelings or desires of one aspect of the personality. The more extreme versions of this have been publically vilified and fear-mongers on FOX news and other “media” sources have pointed fingers at groups like Anonymous and at anonymity over the internet as a whole. I tend to believe that you cannot completely vilify any group entirely; everything is shades of gray and Anons are no where near the darkest part of the spectrum….


Interesting quotation from the beginning of a paper:
“Early research on online self-presentation mostly focused on identity constructions in anonymous online environments. Such studies found that individuals tended to engage in role-play games and anti-normative behaviors in the online world. More recent studies have examined identity performance in less anonymous online settings such as Internet dating sites and reported different findings. The present study investigates identity construction on Facebook, a newly emerged nonymous online environment. Based on content analysis of 63 Facebook accounts, we find that the identities produced in this nonymous environment differ from those constructed in the anonymous online environments previously reported. Facebook users predominantly claim their identities implicitly rather than explicitly; they "show rather than tell" and stress group and consumer identities over personally narrated ones.”

Also, the idea that the internet is ephemeral creates, perhaps, a feeling of inability to connect with others or that of anomie may instigate things like “trolling” or behavior that seeks to evoke any kind of reaction in order to somehow confirm/affirm the existence of the person.

Potential Project Abstract...

This project seeks to look at how anonymity is used over the internet to create an identity and then how that separate identity allows the person behind the anonymous persona to divorce themselves from their particular society’s normative values. The idea of anonymity over the internet has generated much furor and many believe that the so-called lack of accountability granted by that anonymity will have an incredibly destructive effect on society. However, anonymity allows the user to create a persona that reflects ideas or feelings that he or she may not feel comfortable expressing whilst constrained by the social mores of his/her physical community. The different reasons behind the decision to be anonymous have even been seen to create new communities and groups over the internet; PostSecret has become a place for people to express their secrets anonymously and potentially to prevent suicide and feelings of anomie while anons seeking to change society or to mock it (vigillanteism vs. the “lulz”) seem to gravitate to Anonymous. Looking at previous studies of anonymity, collective identity, and the internet phenomena of PostSecret, 4chan, and Anonymous (to give a few examples), this project will attempt to address how anonymity is allowing people to create new identities, identities that have a social disconnect from traditional views of morality or ‘moral rectitude’, and thus allows for, perhaps, a more honest form of reflection on the self and on society. Whether this will cause creative destruction of both, or simply devolution into chaos and moral abyss, is another avenue that will be explored.

the embedded video-magic

"Identity through Anonymity" using Tryad's music



"Identity through Anonymity" using Grace Valhalla's music

First Video!!!!!!!

WOOHOOO!!!!! After hours upon hours of computer struggles, climbing from the abyss of technological lack of knowledge, and with copious help from friends, my first video is completed! I have semi-conquered Vegas and have uploaded my first YouTube video! In the words of Larry Lessig, I have entered back into the realm of the "RWs - the read-writers" as opposed to merely being an "RO - a read-only". This is so exciting!

The video was actually really fun to make once the initial 2 hour struggle to learn how to splice and dice videos on Vegas was over. I'm stoked about it! I even have two versions of the same movie! I liked it so much that I had to try two separate music tracks in the background. If anybody is reading this - WATCH THEM!! They're pretty cool... (maybe not, but I'm still excited!) and then leave me comments, critiques, criticisms, and/or suggestions for improvement (if you feel so inclined...).

Two Editions -
Identity through Anonymity using music from Tryad called "Alone"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI38OgNYnxs

Identity through Anonymity using music from Grace Valhalla called "summerCamp"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AuPQDEuPMs

If you don't want a link - the videos can both be found under "Identity through Anonymity" on YouTube. As I start my research, I was intrigued by the reasons behind anonymity. Why do people deliberately shed the ties and links to their traditional "identity" in favor of creating an identity that essentially exists in a vacuum for an assumed limited amount of time. How does this change how people view morality? Do they still hold to their society's moral code, or do they abandon it? Do they embrace hypocrisy, do they try to make the world better? SecretPost and Anonymous/4chan/etc seem to be different sides of the same coin. One tends to use anonymity to share, comfort, create community while Anonymous tries to act as a pseudo-vigilante and as a somewhat sophomoric hedonist who derives pleasure from the plight of or attack on others, and also to create a group (if not a community). Just some thoughts...

I tried to use the connection to the black and white movie "The Invisible Man" in conjunction with clips attributed to Anonymous members to emphasize the idea of anonymity, of the power that anonymity has in generating an identity completely other and mostly divorced from the "real" identity of the person - in fact, some people call their "anonymous" or adopted personas as more real than their originals... I was wondering if perhaps there were correlations to the pursuit of anonymity to other cultures who have "true names" or who delay naming children until they begin to develop distinctly discernible personalities?

My First Post!!!!!

Hello to all. This is the beginning of the voyage to anonymity... understanding, that is.
We had our first Digital Ethnography class today, discussing anonymity and the course of our course. Discussing the subject matter, I was interested in the history of anonymity as an idea and then how anonymity has changed and perhaps become more accessible with the advent of the internet. In coffee shop discussions, Plato and his idea of the ring of Gyges was mentioned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges). This parable tells of a magical ring that turns its wearers invisible and how the invisibility, the anonymity if you will, made it impossible for the wearers to adhere to the code of moral conduct espoused by their cultures. This could then be linked to more modern tales like Tolkien's series with the 'one ring' turning its wearers invisible and The Invisible Man (where the invisible, anonymous central character commits horrible crimes and is completely unaccountable. Other ideas tossed around were from V for Vendetta, pseudonyms, and pen names (Ben Franklin, Samuel Clemens, etc.). Throughout history, people have assumed "false" names, guises, masks, and dreamed of what they could do with invisibility or complete anonymity.
Now with anonymity even more accessible, how has the idea of being anonymous changed? How is it used? Through RPGs, Anonymous (the group), hate mail, love mail, videos, blogs, and everything else, are we seeing a polarization of identity via the internet? With a fascination with "efame", so-called every-day people can become internet stars via youtube or post themselves via media like Facebook and Myspace. At the other end of the spectrum are the ones who choose to remain anonymous. Those who do not espouse their legal names over the internet and either act alone or in a group with the assumption of anonymity...

So, that's basically where my meandering thoughts have left me at the moment. More to come sooner rather than later.