New Media Culture

As the media gains ever more access to our homes it becomes ever more used a tool of 'the powers that be'. It is used to beam 'real life' events directly into our homes, such as the Iraq and Afganistan conflicts. Governments rely on the institutions of the media which we trust so implicitly to convey a message about the state of the world, and our place as law abiding, 'anti-terrorist' westerners in it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton summed up the way in which media control has always, and continues to work when he said;

"We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safe-guards against freedom. Managed in a modern style, the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him about whether he wants to be free and he will not free himself"

It can be seen that if we are presented with the notion that our freedom and safety are under threat, we will be so fearful that we will support anything, even if the cause is a wrong and unjust one. This ability the media has to control us is more prevalent now than it ever has been in western society.

In the modern mass media, as with most public sectors, the emphasis in 2008 will be to streamline both companies and products by means of convergence. As companies globalise, they form mergers and takeovers and rather than there be, for example, 200 small companies within a particular sector, there will only be 10 companies, each controlling a massive share of their sector. It is this tipe of convergence and domination that is the primary concern of anti-capitalist groups.
And it is not just the companies which are being streamlined, as they cash in on the market craze for gagdets. Rather than have a mobile phone AND an mp3 player, you can now have both contained within one device. You can also have a camera, and the internet, and a fax machine, and a diary, all rolled into one 'uber' piece of technology. It appears though that although convergence is a natural progression for media technology, the money making idea behind it is not to create revenue, but to remove competitors revenue by offering all products in one device. Once a customer has bought a particular companies device, they have no reason to go out and buy competitors products.

In the modern age it is obvious that in the western world it is impossible to be anonymous, in that every aspect of our lives is documented and recorded in order to 'keep track' of us. Early inventions such as photography began this trend as it preserved a persons image long after they had died. The culture of surveillance continued into the 20th Century, with the surveillance camera becoming the new tool for 'watching' the nation.

We have now found ourselves living in a world dominated by surveillance. People are now monitered and photographed and tagged and observed, all in the name of national security and crime prevention in the wake of such events as 9/11 and 7/7. It is this new culture which has brought about a feeling of fear among the public as the pressure to conform and 'behave' helps the government keep tabs on every man woman and child.

It is clear that as technology moves on traditional media forms are forced to move along at equal pace in order to retain interest in them. This is becoming ever more true of music as some producers attempt to turn the experience into a more multi-dimensional one through the use of images. This 'expansion' of the traditional music industry is something which has been recognised as the way it is heading for many years. In Glenn Gould's Prospects of Recording (1966) he offers his thoughts on the future of music as technology allows it to adapt;

"I predicted that the public concert as we know it today would no
longer exist a century hence, that its functions would have been
entirely taken over by electronic media.

Recordings deal with concepts through which the past is re-evaluated,
and they concern notions about the future which will ultimately
question even the validity of evaluation."

This new innovation which Gould spoke of was the VJ. It is the invention of this new player within the world of live music which has injected this media with an influx of electronic media. This new medium has proved itself so useful and reliable that it commonplace for most night clubs, and an large touring band to employ a plethora of electronic innovations to enhance the music itself, ranging from highly skilled lighting technicians to interactive video screens. VJ's have simply allowed the world of music, be it live or recorded, to involve more than just one of the bodies senses.

As traditional forms of photography have evolved in line with contemporary technological developments, so the output of the artists within this medium has become less and less traditional in the way it presents an image and an aesthetic. With developments in the effects achievable, and most recently the advent of digital technology it could be argued that although once being an art form which relied solely on the "truth" it has now lost its biggest asset. Its authenticity. Where once a photograph conveyed a real life event, it can now be edited and tampered with in the pursuit of "fine art".

The biggest change to be brought about by new technology and its connection with digital aesthetics is that photographers have become less interested in reporting and representing the truth. The truest of art forms has lost its greatest asset, all in an attempt to modenise an art form, from both a producers, and a consumers point of view.

As man and machine become ever more heavily entwined, it could be the case that we see a revival of a branch of science which was outlawed a few years ago. That is the debate around cloning. Although a fairly new innovation in the scientific world, the ideas surrounding it have been discussed for over a hundered years. It was Sigmund Frued who wrote in 1928;

“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent”.

This idea of clonong was explored int the movie 'Sixth Day', which explored the idea of a farming facility which cloned human organs for transplants, but developed the technology, illegally, to clone an entire human being, as well as means to store a persons memories from the cerebral cortex which can be re-implanted into a persons brain once thay have been cloned.
The movie was released around the time of the passing of the Sixth Day Laws which prohibited the cloning of a human brain. It served to show, in th most part, that although the idea of never losing a loved one looks appealing, it completely devalues human life, and effectively transforms the human race into a kind of immortal machine, in complete contradiction to nature.

The new idea of a technological way of thought which allows us to expand technology not only outwards into the universe, but inwards into the body raising many interesting questions. It brings about a situation within society which allows us to edit and alter our natural human form, in the same way that we have altered and updated software for years.

A famous exponent of this idea in the artistic world is Orlan whose the first to use plastic surgery as her medium. The aim of her work is to highlight the fact that "objective (beauty) is unattainable and the process horrifying". She sums up her work very eloquently when she says it is "a self-portrait in the classical sense, yet realized through the technology of our time."

Another artist who employs a similar style is the Australian artist Stelarc who has developed a set of prosthetics which attach directly to his nervous system and can perform many different tasks at his command. He does this to suggest that we must rely on machines to fill in the gaps which are created by our individual physical limitations.
  He uses a rather chilling example to highlight the fact that man and machine have inevitably grown closer and closer together in the modern world;

“The first phase of technology contained the body, whereas now miniaturised tech can be implanted in the body.  If the tech is small, the body acts as if it were not there, it becomes a component...”His theories and ideas give a sense that we needn't be slowed down by the notion of darwinian evolution and that we can utilise technology to enhance our species in the long term.

Now it is time to look at the notion of an extended or virtual reality. Negroponte looks at the ways in which we will interact with machines in the future as they become sensitive to our physical and emotional needs. He suggests that as we learn to tailor our surroundings to meet our individual needs we will a kind of digital liberation. We will be led through the internet in a way which has never been seen before as we move around in a virtual world, in a not dissimilar way to how we move around the real world. We will interact with what he calls a “Cyberdock” in which we are not just presented with information but we are able to interact with it as if were a ‘real’ and evolving piece. It will also allow internet companies to provide relevantly links which are interlinked with the information and ideas present. It does, however, appear to give a sense of a virtual world which is every bit as frantic and fast paced as the real world. This suggests that although we may be able to move human experience into a different dimension, these experiences will always remain the same, based around capitalism and the pursuit of a materially better wellbeing.

In Cronenberg’s Videodrome he attempts to look at the consequences of humans directs interaction with technology, with the biggest problem being that of the separation of the ‘real’ and ‘virual’ Worlds. The movie succeeds in creating the sense that although we rely heavily on technology in the modern world, it is important that we keep these two vastly different worlds as two separate entities. Considering this film was made in 1982 it is remarkably relevant even today. As we watch the gradual convergence and advancement of the technological sector, the issues raised in the film become ever more relevant.

It is also plainly obvious that new media has allowed the media sector to expand at a frenetic pace. Traditionally it was television, radio and print media which provided the world with information. Nowadays it is impossible to spend the day without coming into contact with some form of media. From mobile phones, to the internet, to posters, billboards and flyers. The list is almost endless!!

It appears that the term "New Media" simply refers to the wave of new technology which is gathering pace everyday in the western world. This is simply not the case. The term new media can be used as an umbrella term for not only the new technology itself, but the way it alters our reception and attitude towards the modern mass media.