Ch.16 "Shaping the 'Me' in MySpace": Social Network Sites Also Lacking Authenticity?

"Dos and Don'ts When Using Social Networks" Video

"Web 2.0 Summit: Self Expression through Social Media- Chris Poole" Video

As stated previously, “the ‘rules’ of what counts as a digital story are often clearly defined” and “certain forms and content are clearly encouraged” (287), since each digital story contains the same voice, plot, and montage. This standardization in digital storytelling might then prevent its author to fully express themselves, thus lacking some authenticity and realism. But when comparing digital stories to social network sites (SNS), it appears otherwise. In this article, David Brake, a Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Communications at the University of Bedfordshire, evaluates whether SNS like MySpace prevents the self-expression its users through its unauthentic programming. And I agree with him after reflecting how I use SNS like Facebook and YouTube to not define who I am as a person but to connect to the other people who share the same music, games, and movies interests as me. By SNS’s constant display of mainstream movies, music, restaurants, and other consumerist goods that generally define popular culture, users are limited as to what things they like and don’t like. Likewise, a user is encouraged to “‘commoditize’ one’s self” to the degree of defining his or her personal attributes to material things (295). As seen in the second video above, there rises the issue of SNS being a consumerist space and not a democratic space, through its overly simplistic and standardized programming of giving its user only one page to describe who they are.  Users thus connect to other users not for the basis of understanding one another’s identities but for the basis of consuming and advertising products. Users generally make up consumers and not individuals. This is also clearly seen in the first video which reveals the constant advertising on social networks while ironically advertising its sponsor, Mc Afee. So SNS appears to have less authenticity than digital stories, since they are standardized spaces for the communication between consumers, not between human beings.

 

Ch.6 "Mediatized Lives": The Question of Whether Digital Storytelling is Authentic?

                           

The Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling.

Pain - a digital story by Anh Vuong

Honestly, I have mix feelings while reading Knut Lundby’s Digital Storytelling.  Chapter 6“Mediatized Lives: Autobiography & Assumed Authenticity in Digital Storytelling” rises the issue of whether this new social media, digital storytelling truly “represents the personality and identity of its [human] creator” while seeking to make its thematic messages appeal to many viewers (Lundby 106). As seen in the given video links, the style of digital storytelling is quite standardized, for all include dialogue, non-diegetic music, and transitioning photos. So most digital stories seem to follow the same format in narrative, editing, and sound to better grasp the viewer’s attention. Following this logic, there is the possibility of the creator’s life story being glamorized and altered for entertainment purposes. Hence, digital stories on YouTube that do not have catchy narratives, soundtracks, and images or good sound and image quality would most likely have fewer viewers. And this would make the creator’s life story less comprehensible and shared to other individuals who might have undergone similar life situations. 

However, I somewhat view this question of whether digital storytelling is authentic storytelling, not quite relevant because there are many other forms of expansive media like feature-length films, art, and written autobiographies whose details can be tweaked for entertainment purposes. For example, there is Sean Penn’s film, Into the Wild (2007) that includes various flashbacks and music scores to present the life, Christopher McCandless as adventurous and spiritual. Likewise, the second digital story above uses music scores and images of concrete sidewalks to further tell the depressing story of an Asian-American girl and her father. But sure, one is uses more technical the other, but in either case, the presentation of the narrative is influenced by various film techniques (sound, editing, mise-en-scene, cinematography) to better appeal to the audience’s emotions. So I don’t really know where the authors, Lundby and Hertzberg was going with this idea because when you think about it, most stories founded in media is exaggerated and altered to some degree to go beyond reality.

Ch. 28 "Changing Space": Virtual Reality in Film

 

Charlotte Davies - Éphémère, Responsive Environment 1998:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa_aiw7yhp

 The Virtual Reality Device from Disclosure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFkyV7d5t8o 

The essay, “Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being” mentions about the Canadian artist, Charlotte Davies and her digital media project, Osmoses. Deriving from the term, ‘osmosis’ meaning the spontaneous movement of molecules from one space to another, osmoses is the spontaneous movement of human subjects from one space to another. As seen the first given clip above, Osmoses is a computer program in which external human subjects viewing it in reality get submerged into an alternate reality on screen. Here, the complex images and sounds transport the viewer into a space that breaks away from the fixed ontologies of reality (narratives, social structures, physics, geometry, etc.) that can inhibit/control his or her subjectivity. As she said herself, “her intent is to “reaffirm the role of the subjectivity experienced, ‘felt’ body in cyberspace" (294). In other words, the goal of Osmoses is to externalize the viewer’s internal thoughts and emotions in a fictionalized space outside reality.

But does this virtual reality completely breaks away from reality in film? Well, while looking at the second clip from the sci-fi movie, Disclosure, Michael Douglass’s character is physically and mentally transported to various spaces while wearing some type of technological headgear. This human subject on screen is able to maintain balance and existence in spaces where the architecture of buildings constantly change. Unlike in Osmoses where there are no human perspectives, this film identifies the character’s physical nature in the given space. This scene in Disclosure then seems to prioritize the human perspective over the space, making the environment in which the subject moves throughout appear very artificial and synthetic. But the spaces in both Osmoses and Disclosure seem to originate from that of reality, for while one inhabits underwater plants, the other inhabits rigid walls and columns. So they can each be taken from the perspective of a scuba diver or an architect. In either case, both spaces to some degree depict aspects of reality and human experiences so that the outside viewer can connect and understand the given content, even though the spaces are artificially and technologically created by human programmers like Davies.

 

                                        

Ch.6 "Cybernated Art" & "Art Satellite": Modern Art's Pros & Cons

Ch. 6 of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Edited by Ken Jordan and Randall Packer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=fvwp&v=IOW9S5z26ac
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2xU4Arb8FI
         
I have to say I actually enjoyed reading Chapter 6 from the Multimedia textbook because it brought out some interesting points regarding modern art's pros and cons within its politics and aesthetics. As seen in his “Cybernated Art” and “Art Satellite” essays, the Korean-American video-artist, Nam June Paik was a great figure who contributed to the 20^th century Avant-Garde Art movement. Unlike other musicians who created completely new compositions or imitated past classic composers like Mozart and Beethoven for mass audiences, Paik was one who did otherwise. To him, art is made up of “not new things but the new relationships between things already existing” (Jordon, Packer 41).  In other words, modern art like cybernated art should utilize and re-transform art of the past to better suit the ideologies of modern society.  As seen in the first video where Paik is being interviewed, there are quick snippets of his work where an American cellist and a Korean drummer are traditionally playing their instruments in spaces where sounds and images are contorted. Instead of playing their instruments in live performance at a concert, these musicians are videotaped and edited with colorful montages and special effects. A viewer then becomes interactive and not so much absorbed within the art, for he or she is left confused by the illogical assembly of images and is forced to question its overall meaning. And the information-overload provided to viewers by these outlandish images and sounds can illustrate modern society’s high consumerism in a technological age preceding computers and internet. Cybernated art thus becomes an art that juxtaposes and modernizes different aesthetics that already exist in television, music, and fine art to produce new meanings on reality.

And Paik’s fusion of different mediums that went beyond popular art forms can be a metaphor of him fusing different cultures together to defy social norms. This is clearly seen in the second video where the American female cellist, Charlotte Moorman is interviewed for her involvement in Paik’s Opera Sexotronique performance which was widely controversial politically and socially in the late 1960s due to involving public nudity. Here, she describes how this and other performances involving her being nude while playing the cello was not problematic in Asia, Europe and South America until it was featured in New York. She justifies her act of nudity as being artistic not criminal, for she compares her performance to that of topless African dancers who were previously able to perform on the exact same stage months ago. But regardless, Paik and Moorman’s performance was cut short and they were arrested for breaking the obscenity law. This incident eventually went to court and because Moorman's nudity was intentionally used as an instrument along with her cello for intellectual/aesthetic purposes, the American justice system to this day rules nudity in art to be unconstitutional if it is unintentional and fortuitous. But as Moorman points out, this ruling enabled porn shops to distribute degrading, nude images for the sake of what they call profitable ‘art’. So what is art? And to what degree can nudity in modern art be distinguished from nudity in pornography? This overall event reflects the problematic nature of the obscenity law and the U.S. government’s unclear definition of what is obscene art. Thus, in its effort to defy social norms like public nudity and consumerism, cybernated art within the Avant-Garde Art Movement can be viewed as problematic and not so much embraced by all viewers. While being a constant, unfiltered flow of information for anyone to access and witness, cybernated art can innately be perceived by most viewers as being too bizarre and offensive like that of pornography (which goes against its overall purpose and meaning). Thus, while having its pros, this unpopular art can also have its cons.