Xiphias Press: New Media Report: Culture Jamming and The Occupy Movement

New Media Report:

Culture Jamming and The Occupy Movement

Xiphias Press

Xiphias Press

San Diego, CA 92107

Edited by Elmer K. Levine

Unless stated otherwise, the findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in the materials in this publication do not necessarily represent the views of Xiphias Press.

Preface:

"From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world" –Journalist, Ben Berkowitz

Table of Contents:

Introduction 9

New Media 39
The Village Voice
Mother Jones
National Public Radio
Waxweb
Internet Radio
Drudge Report
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
WikiLeaks
Open Leaks
Kickstarter
The Story of Stuff
The Diaspora Project
Tumblr
Change.org

Spirit Science

Culture Jamming 206
Obey Giant: Worldwide Propaganda Delivery
®™ark (RTMArk)
The Yes Men
Disinfo.com
Dangerous Minds
Biopunk
Collapse: A Movie by Michael Ruppert
Eric Bidwell for Mayor

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Art and Politics
Music and Politics
Political Cinema
Political Fiction
Swarm Intelligence
Human-based computation

Crowd Sourcing

The Occupy Movement 332
Adbusters
Zeitgeist: The Movie
The Zeitgeist Movement
European Sovereign Debt Crisis
The Global Financial Crisis
World Protest Movement 2010-2011
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Together
Anonymous
The Anonymous Message
We are the 99%
Economics:
Founding Fathers
The Federalist Papers
Introduction to Economics
Free Enterprise
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Resource Based Economy
Venus Project

Epilogue: 659

Introduction

The Occupy Movement, although still going on at the time of this writing, has left the tents of downtown cities around the United States and around the world and entered the psyche of people everywhere. At first viewed as fringe elements or socialist, the concerns of today’s protesters involve everyone, the 99% and the 1%. For we live by a society built upon the rule of law. That is why these have been peaceful demonstrations of civil disobedience. Vocal protestors have successfully moved from confronting law enforcement to interviewing before cameras. If the ultimate purpose is to communicate a public message then post a video online. Your opinion does matter and if you have a better way of doing things people will listen. Decisions are made in the courts, boardrooms, and living rooms of America and around the world. And now we have the internet as our microphone.

The chapters on the European Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Global Financial Crisis outline in some detail the causes of the recent economic downturn, and policy and market adjustments. These are ultimately the reason for the subsequent protests of Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere around the world. Later, the section on economics serves as an introduction to the subject of money and politics rather a numerical analysis. The Founding Fathers may have had it right in from the start. The true question that remains today as it did then is to determine what powers are to be delegated to regional states versus the federation. In the struggle of freedom and liberty of the individual to the opportunity and welfare of the community at large, let there be hope. Whether you have an MBA or are a small business owner, a student or housekeeper, I encourage you to read the Federalist Papers which are available free online.

Let us be clear in our intent and sincere in our actions for it is the well-being of us all that moves us forward to provide for our families and build a future for our children. As children we look to our parents as an example and they are responsible for teaching us virtue, pride and humility. And as children we are responsible to be intent on doing the right thing. If there are problems to be solved let us start with our own children. Then we can be better neighbors and business partners. For freedom and opportunity will lead to goodwill and prosperity.

You do not need a law degree to know what is right. In the current financial structure the scales of justice appear to have been weighted against the common man. It certainly helps to be as informed as possible and the advent of social networking and the access to current events via the internet have provided us with the tools necessary to accomplish that task. Let us all, like the Founding Fathers before us, work to achieve that balance.

The Zeitgeist movie came to me while living in an artist community in San Diego. I have written about many of these subjects since the nineteen eighties in my philosophy thesis in college and later in fiction. For some people it is a revelation, for me it is the presentation. To correlate human history and endeavors on a grand scale while simultaneously analyzing business strategy as well as spiritual and technological development. It eventually leads us to Jacques Fresco’s Venus Project, which is one possible future that continues the lifelong collective works of Buckminster Fuller and the Garden City Movement of late the 19^th century.

Mass Media vs. New Media

Mass Media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media (also known as electronic media) transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles. Alternatively, print media uses a physical object as a means of sending their information, such as a newspaper, magazines, brochures, newsletters, books, leaflets and pamphlets. Photography can also be included under this subheading as it is a medium which communicated through visual representations. The term also refers to the organizations which control these technologies, such as television stations or publishing companies. Mobile phones, computers and Internet are sometimes referred to as Digital Media. Internet media is able to achieve mass media status in its own right, due to the many mass media services it provides, such as email, websites, blogging, Internet and TV. For this reason, many mass media outlets have a presence on the web, by such things as having TV ads which link to a website, or having games in their sites to entice gamers to visit their website. In this way, they can utilize the easy accessibility that the internet has, and the outreach that internet affords, as information can easily be broadcast to many different regions of the world simultaneously and cost-efficiently. Outdoor media is a form of mass media which comprises billboards, signs, placards placed inside and outside of commercial buildings/objects like shops/buses, flying billboards (signs in tow of airplanes), blimps, and skywriting. Public speaking and event organizing can also be considered as a form of mass media. [Uttara Manohar. "Different Types of Mass Media". Buzzle.com.], [S.E. Smith. "What is Mass Media?" October 4, 2011.]

Until recent time, mass media was clearly defined and consisted of eight mass media industries: books, newspapers, magazines, recordings, radio, movies, television and the internet. With the explosion of digital communication technology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the question of what forms of media should be classified as "Mass Media" has become more prominent. For example, it is controversial whether to include cell phones, video games and computer games (such as MMORPGs) in the definition. Currently, mass media is classified into the "seven mass media": print, recordings, cinema, radio, television, internet, mobile phones.

While a telephone is a two way communication device, mass media refers to medium which can communicate a message to a large group, often simultaneously. However, modern cell phones are no longer a single use device. Most cell phones are equipped with internet access and capable of connecting to the web which itself a mass medium.

Video games are also evolving into a mass medium. Video games convey the same messages and ideologies to all their users. Players sometimes share the experience with each other by playing online. Excluding the internet however, it is questionable whether players of video games are sharing a common experience when they play the game separately. It is possible to discuss in great detail the events of a video game with a friend you have never played with because the experience was nearly identical to you both.

Mass media is also sometimes referred to as the "mainstream media", due to the tendency of media choosing to choose prominent, yet trivial, stories which will be of interest to a general audience, such as celebrity break-ups, while ignoring controversial or intellectually stimulating news. This trend is attributed to the fact that media, though used to provide a service to the public to keep them updated, is essentially a business and will naturally do what it must to sell newspapers or magazines etc. Mass media has become one of the main sources of news and entertainment for the general public.

Mass media is distinguished from local media by the notion that whilst the former aims to reach a very large market such as the entire population of a country, the latter broadcasts to a much smaller population and area, and generally focuses on regional news rather than global events. A third type of media, specialty media, provides for specific demographics, such as specialty channels on TV (sports channels, adult channels, shopping channels, etc.). These definitions are not set in stone, and it is possible for a media outlet to be promoted in status from a local media outlet to a global media outlet. Some local media, which takes an interest in state or provincial news, can rise to prominence due to their investigative journalism, and to the local region's preference of updates in national politics rather than regional news.

One major criticism of the mass media is that it can be too superficial. A mass media is often forced to cover national and international news due to it having to cater for and be relevant for a wide demographic. As such, it has to skip over many interesting or important local stories because they simply do not interest the large majority of their viewers. Despite the view that broadcast media and digital media have made print media obsolete, there exists a majority of audiences who prefer the print media for various communication purposes. [Uttara Manohar. "Different Types of Mass Media". Buzzle.com.]

The phrase "the media" began to be used in the 1920s. The notion of "mass media" was generally restricted to print media up until the post-Second World War, when radio, television and video were introduced. The audio-visual networks became very popular, because they provided both information and entertainment, because the color and sound engaged the viewers or listeners and because it was easier for the general public to passively watch TV or listen to the radio than to actively read. In recent times, the Internet becomes the latest and most popular mass medium. Information has become readily available through websites, and easily accessible through search engines. One can do many activities at the same time, such as playing games, listening to music, and social networking. Whilst other forms of mass media are restricted in the type of information they can offer, the internet comprises a large percentage of the sum of human knowledge through such things as Google Books. Modern day mass media consists of the internet, mobile phones, blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds. [Ajanta Bhattacharyya. "History of Mass Media". Buzzle.com.]

Digital Media and the Internet
The Internet, also known as "the Net" or as "the Web", is a more interactive medium of mass media, and can be briefly described as "a network of networks". Specifically, it is the worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and governmental networks, which together carry various information and services, such as e-mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.

Contrary to some common usage, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous: the Internet is the system of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections etc.; the Web is the contents, or the interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The World Wide Web is accessible through the Internet, along with many other services including e-mail, file sharing and RSS feeds.

The advent of the World Wide Web marked the first era in which most individuals could have a means of exposure on a scale comparable to that of mass media. Anyone with a web site has the potential to address a global audience, although serving to high levels of web traffic is still relatively expensive. It is possible that the rise of peer-to-peer technologies may have begun the process of making the cost of bandwidth manageable. Although a vast amount of information, imagery, and commentary (i.e. "content") has been made available, it is often difficult to determine the authenticity and reliability of information contained in web pages as in many cases material is self-published. The invention of the Internet has also allowed breaking news stories to reach around the globe within minutes. This rapid growth of instantaneous, decentralized communication is often deemed likely to change mass media and its relationship to society.

The Internet is quickly becoming the center of mass media. Everything is becoming accessible via the internet. Instead of picking up a newspaper, or watching the 10 o'clock news, people can log onto the internet to get the news they want, when they want it. For example, many workers listen to the radio through the Internet while sitting at their desk.

In the United States media is dominated by five major companies, Time Warner, VIACOM, Vivendi Universal, Walt Disney and News Corp, which own 95% of all mass media including theme parks, movie studios, television and radio broadcast networks and programing, video news, sports entertainment, telecommunications, wireless phones, video games software, electronic media and music companies.

Mass media play a significant role in shaping public perceptions on a variety of important issues, both through the information that is dispensed through them, and through the interpretations they place upon this information. To reproduce a certain interpretation of reality, we shape reality to be more recognizable with our own interpretation of reality. In his book The Commercialization of American Culture, Matthew P. McAllister says that "a well-developed media system, informing and teaching its citizens, helps democracy move toward its ideal state." Mass Media also plays a significant role in shaping modern culture, by selecting and portraying a particular set of beliefs, values, and traditions or even an entire way of life, as reality. [Mary Vipond. “The Mass Media in Canada” (2000). James Lorimer & Company.], [“Mass Media. http://www.enotes.com/mass-media-article]

Globalism and Technological Convergence:

A “Technological Convergence” is the tendency for different technological systems to evolve towards performing similar tasks. Convergence can refer to previously separate technologies such as voice and telephone, data, productivity applications, and video that now share resources and interact with each other synergistically.

The rise of digital communication in the late 20th century has made it possible for media organizations or individuals to deliver text, audio, and video material over the same wired, wireless, or fiber-optic connections. Convergence in this context can also be defined as the interlinking of computing and other information technologies, media content, and communication networks that has arisen as the result of the evolution and popularization of the Internet as well as the activities, products and services that have emerged in the digital media space. Today CNN, FOX, and MTV are broadcast worldwide while Americans are watching Russia Today, Deutsche Welle and BBC World News.

Internet communications now affect all of human activity and social life such as in private business, government, news reporting, healthcare, arts and culture, and education and are increasingly being carried out in these digital media spaces across a growing network of information and technology devices. You can walk out the house with an Andriod phone or an iPad and carry with you a digital library, videos, games, music, maps, phone and e-mail directories or any other application at your fingertips.

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005) is an international bestselling book by Thomas Friedman that analyzes globalization, in the early 21st century. The title is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce, where all competitors have an equal opportunity. The title also alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

In the book, The World is Flat, Friedman recounts a journey to Bangalore, India, when he realized globalization has changed core economic concepts. In his opinion, this flattening is a product of a convergence of personal computer with fiber-optic micro cable with the rise of work flow software. He termed this period as Globalization 3.0, differentiating this period from the previous Globalization 1.0 (in which countries and governments were the main protagonists) and the Globalization 2.0 (in which multinational companies led the way in driving global integration).

Friedman recounts many examples of companies based in India and China that, by providing labor from typists and call center operators to accountants and computer programmers, have become integral parts of complex global supply chains for companies such as Dell, AOL, and Microsoft. Friedman's Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention is discussed in the book's penultimate chapter.
Friedman repeatedly uses lists as an organizational device to communicate key concepts, usually numbered, and often with a provocative label. Two example lists are the ten forces that flattened the world, and three points of convergence.

Friedman defines ten "flatteners" that he sees as leveling the global playing field:

#1: Collapse of the Berlin Wall – 11/9/89: Friedman called the flattener, "When the walls came down, and the windows came up." The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold War, it allowed people from the other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. "11/9/89" is a discussion about the Berlin Wall coming down, the "fall" of communism, and the impact that Windows powered PCs (personal computers) had on the ability of individuals to create their own content and connect to one another. At that point, the basic platform for the revolution to follow was created: IBM PC, Windows, a standardized graphical interface for word processing, dial-up modems, a standardized tool for communication, and a global phone network.

#2: Netscape – 8/9/95: Netscape went public at the price of $28. Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by "early adopters and geeks" to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year-olds. The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music, and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.

#3: Workflow software: Friedman's catch-all for the standards and technologies that allowed work to flow. The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved, as stated by Friedman. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a "crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration." There was an emergence of software protocols (SMTP – simple mail transfer protocol; HTML – the language that enabled anyone to design and publish documents that could be transmitted to and read on any computer anywhere) Standards on Standards. This is what Friedman called the "Genesis moment of the flat world." The net result "is that people can work with other people on more stuff than ever before." This created a global platform for multiple forms of collaboration. The next six flatteners sprung from this platform.

#4: Uploading: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon "the most disruptive force of all."

#5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components which can be subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way. This process became easier with the mass distribution of fiber optic cables during the introduction of the World Wide Web.

#6: Offshoring: The internal relocation of a company's manufacturing or other processes to a foreign land to take advantage of less costly operations there. China's entrance in the WTO (World Trade Organization) allowed for greater competition in the playing field. Now countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil must compete against China and each other to have businesses offshore to them.

#7: Supply-chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping.

#8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company's employees perform services – beyond shipping – for another company. For example, UPS repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.

#9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. "Never before in the history of the planet have so many people – on their own – had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people," writes Friedman. The growth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, in which Friedman states that it is "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago."

#10: "The Steroids": Wireless, Voice over Internet, and file sharing. Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual – all analog content and processes (from entertainment to photography to word processing) can be digitized and therefore shaped, manipulated and transmitted; virtual – these processes can be done at high speed with total ease; mobile – can be done anywhere, anytime by anyone; and personal – can be done by you.

In addition to the ten flatteners, Friedman offers "the triple convergence", three additional components that acted on the flatteners to create a new, flatter global playing field.
Up until the year 2000, the ten flatteners were semi-independent from one another. An example of independence is the inability of one machine to perform multiple functions. When work-flow software and hardware converged, multiple functions such as e-mail, fax, printing, copying and communicating were able to be done from one machine. Around the year 2000, all the flatteners converged with one another. This convergence could be compared to complementary goods, in that each flattener enhanced the other flatteners; the more one flattener developed, the more leveled the global playing field became.

After the emergence of the ten flatteners, a new business model was required to succeed. While the flatteners alone were significant, they would not enhance productivity without people being able to use them together. Instead of collaborating vertically (the top-down method of collaboration, where innovation comes from the top), businesses needed to begin collaborating horizontally.

Horizontalization means companies and people collaborate with other departments or companies to add value, creation or innovation. Friedman's Convergence II occurs when horizontalization and the ten flatteners begin to reinforce each other and people understand the capability of the technologies available.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries that had followed the Soviet economic model – including India, China, Russia, and the nations of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia – began to open up their economies to the world. When these new players converged with the rest of the globalized marketplace, they added new brain power to the whole playing field and enhanced horizontal collaboration across the globe. In turn, Convergence III is the most important force shaping politics and economics in the early 21st century.

Thomas Friedman believes that to fight the quiet crisis of a flattening world, the United States work force should keep updating its work skills. Making the work force more adaptable, Friedman argues, will keep it more employable. He also suggests that the government make it easier to switch jobs by making retirement benefits and health insurance less dependent on one's employer and by providing insurance that would partly cover a possible drop in income when changing jobs. Friedman also believes there should be more inspiration for youth to be scientists, engineers, and mathematicians due to a decrease in the percentage of these professionals being American.

With the assistance of machines and networks an “Evolutionary Logic” can emerge as that narrative that outlines our history, religious thought and biological and technological evolution. A government or corporate world is one necessary playing field in a global economy and we can live communally in villages and “network.” We evolve as machine intelligence surpasses our individual abilities.

Superintelligence is real but our greatest asset still is the human mind and the natural environment. Technology allows us to understand the world we live in and provides opportunities for us to spend more time with our families. Ultimately, how we stand in our natural environment determines who we are and what we do.

Perhaps the simple act of growing a vegetable garden or create a pleasant public space to meet people or starting a community group is what we really need. It may not be Ideal for everyone to live in a small village surrounded by countryside or farms, however, even some neighborhoods in the largest cities have a village feel to them. People like a place to walk and watch people. It is the simple things in life that are the most important such as good food, good wine, love, and friendship.

Everyone does benefit from an individual being fiscally responsible, industrious, and creative. One person can and does make a difference. From a village girl sewing a younger siblings clothes to the example of Steve Jobs. He had a vision and created Apple Computer. By all counts it looks like the Steve Jobs digital revolution has done well for us.

Globalization and New Media

The rise of new media has increased communication between people all over the world and the Internet. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media.

Terry Flew, author of the books Games: Technology, Industry, Culture (2005) and Understanding Global Media (2007) stated that as a result of the evolution of new media technologies, globalization occurs. Globalization is generally stated as "more than expansion of activities beyond the boundaries of particular nation states". Globalization shortens the distance between people all over the world by the electronic communication (Carely 1992 in Flew 2002) and Cairncross (1998) expresses this great development as the "death of distance". New media "radically break the connection between physical place and social place, making physical location much less significant for our social relationships" (Croteau and Hoynes 2003: 311).

However, the changes in the new media environment create a series of tensions in the concept of "public sphere". According to Ingrid Volkmer, "public sphere" is defined as a process through which public communication becomes restructured and partly disembedded from national political and cultural institutions. This trend of the globalized public sphere is not only as a geographical expansion form a nation to worldwide, but also changes the relationship between the public, the media and state (Volkmer, 1999:123).

"Virtual Communities" are being established online and transcend geographical boundaries, eliminating social restrictions. Howard Rheingold (2000) describes these globalised societies as self-defined networks, which resemble what we do in real life. "People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk" (Rheingold cited in Slevin 2000: 91). For Sherry Turkle "making the computer into a second self, finding a soul in the machine, can substitute for human relationships" (Holmes 2005: 184). New media has the ability to connect like-minded others worldwide.

While this perspective suggests that the technology drives – and therefore is a determining factor – in the process of globalization, arguments involving technological determinism are generally frowned upon by mainstream media studies. Instead academics focus on the multiplicity of processes by which technology is funded, researched and produced, forming a feedback loop when the technologies are used and often transformed by their users, which then feeds into the process of guiding their future development.

While commentators such as Castells espouse a "soft determinism" whereby they contend that "Technology does not determine society. Nor does society script the course of technological change, since many factors, including individual inventiveness and entrpreneurialism, intervene in the process of scientific discovery, technical innovation and social applications, so the final outcome depends on a complex pattern of interaction. Indeed the dilemma of technological determinism is probably a false problem, since technology is society and society cannot be understood without its technological tools." (Castells 1996:5) This, however, is still distinct from stating that societal changes are instigated by technological development, which recalls the theses of Marshall McLuhan.

Manovich and Castells have argued that whereas mass media "corresponded to the logic of industrial mass society, which values conformity over individuality," (Manovich 2001:41) new media follows the logic of the postindustrial or globalized society whereby "every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and select her ideology from a large number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects to a mass audience, marketing now tries to target each individual separately." (Manovich 2001:42).

Tool for Social Change

Social movement media has a rich and storied history (see Agitprop) that has changed at a rapid rate since New Media became widely used (Chris Atton). The Zapatista Army of National Liberation of Chiapas, Mexico were the first major movement to make widely recognized and effective use of New Media for communiques and organizing in 1994. Since then, New Media has been used extensively by social movements to educate, organize, share cultural products of movements, communicate, coalition build, and more. The WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity was another landmark in the use of New Media as a tool for social change. The WTO protests used media to organize the original action, communicate with and educate participants, and was used as an alternative media source. The Indymedia movement also developed out of this action, and has been a great tool in the democratization of information, which is another widely discussed aspect of new media movement. Some scholars even view this democratization as an indication of the creation of a "radical, socio-technical paradigm to challenge the dominant, neoliberal and technologically determinist model of information and communication technologies." A less radical view along these same lines is that people are taking advantage of the Internet to produce a grassroots globalization, one that is anti-neoliberal and centered on people rather than the flow of capital. Of course, some are also skeptical of the role of New Media in Social Movements. Many scholars point out unequal access to new media as a hindrance to broad-based movements, sometimes even oppressing some within a movement. Others are skeptical about how democratic or useful it really is for social movements, even for those with access. There are also many New Media components that activists cite as tools for change that have not been widely discussed as such by academics.

New Media has also found a use with less radical social movements such as the Free Hugs Campaign. Using websites, blogs, and online videos to demonstrate the effectiveness of the movement itself. Along with this example the use of high volume blogs has allowed numerous views and practices to be more widespread and gain more public attention. Another example is the on-going Free Tibet Campaign, which has been seen on numerous websites as well as having a slight tie-in with the band Gorillaz in their Gorillaz Bitez clip featuring the lead singer 2D sitting with protesters at a Free Tibet protest. Another social change seen coming from New Media is trends in fashion and the emergence of subcultures such as Text Speak, Cyberpunk, and various others.

Interactivity and New Media

Interactivity has become a term for a number of new media use options evolving from the rapid dissemination of Internet access points, the digitalization of media, and media convergence. In 1984, Rice defined new media as communication technologies that enable or facilitate user-to-user interactivity and interactivity between user and information. Such a definition replaces the "one-to-many" model of traditional mass communication with the possibility of a "many-to-many" web of communication. Any individual with the appropriate technology can now produce his or her online media and include images, text, and sound about whatever he or she chooses. Thus the convergence of new methods of communication with new technologies shifts the model of mass communication, and radically reshapes the ways we interact and communicate with one another. in "What is new media?" Vin Crosbie (2002) described three different kinds of communication media. He saw Interpersonal media as "one to one", Mass media as "one to many", and finally New Media as Individuation Media or "many to many".

When we think of interactivity and its meaning, we assume that it is only prominent in the conversational dynamics of individuals who are face-to-face. This restriction of opinion does not allow us to see its existence in mediated communication forums. Interactivity is present in some programming work, such as video games. It's also viable in the operation of traditional media. In the mid-1990s, filmmakers started using inexpensive digital cameras to create films. It was also the time when moving image technology had developed, which was able to be viewed on computer desktops in full motion. This development of new media technology was a new method for artists to share their work and interact with the big world. Other settings of interactivity include radio and television talk shows, letters to the editor, listener participation in such programs, and computer and technological programming. Interactive new media has become a true benefit to every one because people can express their artwork in more than one way with the technology that we have today and there is no longer a limit to what we can do with our creativity.

Interactivity can be considered a central concept in understanding new media, but different media forms possess different degrees of interactivity, and some forms of digitized and converged media are not in fact interactive at all. Tony Feldman considers digital satellite television as an example of a new media technology that uses digital compression to dramatically increase the number of television channels that can be delivered, and which changes the nature of what can be offered through the service, but does not transform the experience of television from the user's point of view, and thus lacks a more fully interactive dimension. It remains the case that interactivity is not an inherent characteristic of all new media technologies, unlike digitization and convergence.

Terry Flew argues that "the global interactive games industry is large and growing, and is at the forefront of many of the most significant innovations in new media" (Flew 2005: 101).

Interactivity is prominent in these online video games such as World of Warcraft, The Sims Online and Second Life. These games, which are developments of "new media," allow for users to establish relationships and experience a sense of belonging that transcends traditional temporal and spatial boundaries (such as when gamers logging in from different parts of the world interact). These games can be used as an escape or to act out a desired life. Will Wright, creator of The Sims, "is fascinated by the way gamers have become so attached to his invention-with some even living their lives through it". New media have created virtual realities that are becoming virtual extensions of the world we live in. With the creation of Second Life and Active Worlds before it, people have even more control over this virtual world, a world where anything that a participant can think of can become a reality.

New Media changes continuously because it is constantly modified and redefined by the interaction between users, emerging technologies, cultural changes, etc.

The new media industry shares an open association with many market segments in areas such as software/video game design, television, radio, and particularly movies, advertising and marketing, through which industry seeks to gain from the advantages of two-way dialogue with consumers primarily through the Internet. The advertising industry has capitalized on the proliferation of new media with large agencies running multi-million dollar interactive advertising subsidiaries. Interactive websites and kiosks have become popular. In a number of cases advertising agencies have also set up new divisions to study new media. Public relations firms are also taking advantage of the opportunities in new media through interactive PR practices. Interactive PR practices include the use of social media to reach a mass audience of online social network users.

Culture Jamming

Culture jamming is often seen as a form of subvertising. Many culture jams are intended to expose apparently questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture. Common tactics include re-figuring logos, fashion statements, and product images as a means to challenge the idea of "what's cool" along with assumptions about the personal freedoms of consumption.

Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.

Culture jamming sometimes entails transforming mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, using the original medium's communication method. Culture jamming is usually employed in opposition to a perceived appropriation of public space, or as a reaction against social conformity. Prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the BLF and Ron English and the street parties and protests organised by Reclaim the Streets. While most culture jamming focuses on subverting or critiquing political or advertising messages, some practitioners focus on a more positive, musically inspired form of jamming that brings together artists, scholars and activists to create new forms of cultural production that transcend rather than merely criticize or negate the status quo.

The term was coined in 1984 by the sound collage band Negativland, with the release of their album JamCon '84. The phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming: that public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies. In one of the tracks of the album, they declared: “As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard . . . directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.”

According to Vince Carducci, although the term was coined by Negativland, culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord. Their main argument was based on the idea that in the past humans dealt with life and the consumer market directly. They argued that this spontaneous way of life was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new "modern" way of life. Situationists saw everything from television to radio as a threat.

The cultural critic Mark Dery traces the origins of culture jamming to medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted, in Rabelais and his World, as an officially sanctioned subversion of the social hierarchy. Modern precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of '60s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, the German concept of Spaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1950s and '60s. The SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication within mass media to sow confusion within the dominant culture.

Two examples of early theater oriented Culture Jamming groups are The Firesign Theatre and the Merry Pranksters. Both have roots to the nineteen sixties California west coast. The Firesign Theatre is an American comedy troupe consisting of Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor. Their brand of surrealistic humor is best known through their record albums, which acquired an enthusiastic following in the late 1960s and early '70s. The troupe began as live radio performers in Los Angeles on radio stations KPPC-FM and KPFK during the mid-1960s.

The group's name stems in part from astrology, because the membership encompasses all three "fire signs:" Aries (Austin), Leo (Proctor), and Sagittarius (Bergman and Ossman). The name also refers to Fireside Theatre, an early television series that ran on NBC from 1949 to 1955, followed by Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955–58); it may also refer to the Fireside Chats radio broadcasts made by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Firesign Theatre employs a stream of consciousness style that includes direct references to movies, radio, TV, political figures, and other cultural sources, intermingled with sound effects and bits of music. The resulting stories, including the theft of a high school, a fair of clowns and holograms and aliens who use hemp smoking to turn people into crows, border on psychedelia, an effect intensified by the frequent appearance of mock "advertisements" satirizing real products.

While their stream of consciousness style has the feel of improvisational comedy, most of the material is tightly scripted and memorized. The group's writing method requires the consent of all four members before a line can be included. The group co-wrote the screenplay to the comedy western, Zachariah, released in 1971. The film was inspired by the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. The Firesign Theatre are still performing today, most recently playing a series of live performances in December 2011. They claim to be the longest surviving group from the "Classic rock" era to still be intact with the original members.

The Merry Pranksters were a group of people who formed around American author Ken Kesey in 1964 and sometimes lived communally at his homes in California and Oregon. The group promoted the use of psychedelic drugs.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus enigmatically and variably labeled "Further" or "Furthur." Their early escapades were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe also documents a notorious 1966 trip on Further from Mexico through Houston, stopping to visit Kesey's friend, novelist Larry McMurtry.

Notable members of the group include Kesey's best friend Ken Babbs and Neal Cassady, Carolyn Garcia (also known as Mountain Girl), Wavy Gravy, the Grateful Dead, Paul Krassner, Stewart Brand, Del Close, Paul Foster, Kentucky Fab Five authors Ed McClanahan (also known as "Captain Kentucky"), and Gurney Norman.

On June 17, 1964, Kesey and 13 Merry Pranksters boarded "Further" at Kesey's ranch in La Honda, California, and set off eastward. Kesey wanted to see what would happen when hallucinogenic-inspired spontaneity confronted what he saw as the banality and conformity of American society. One author has suggested that the bus trip reversed the historic American westward movement of the centuries. [A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History, Cavallo, Dominick (1999) St. Martin's Press, New York.]

The trip's original purpose was to celebrate the publication of Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion and to visit the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. The Pranksters were enthusiastic users of marijuana, amphetamines, and LSD, and in the process of their journey they are said to have "turned on" many people by introducing them to these drugs.

Kesey and the Pranksters also had a relationship with the infamous outlaw motorcycle gang the Hells Angels, who were introduced to LSD by Kesey. The details of their relationship are documented both in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test published in 1968 and in Hunter S. Thompson's book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Poet Allen Ginsberg also wrote a poem, “First Party At Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels.”

The psychedelically painted bus had its stated destination as being "further." This was the goal of the Merry Pranksters, a destination that could only be obtained through the expansion of one's own perceptions of reality. They traveled cross-country giving LSD to anyone who was willing to try it (LSD was legal in the United States until October 1966). On August 5, 2011, directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood released a documentary film, Magic Trip about the Merry Pranksters.

Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions of viewers and bystanders. Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement. Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme to pull on the emotional strings of people and evoke some type of reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger, are often used as catalysts for social change.

The basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme. Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others. The term meme was first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff that claimed memes were a type of media virus. Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate themselves or mutate upon transmission just like a virus. Culture jammers will often use common memes to such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense. In one example, jammer Jonah Perreti used the Nike symbol to stir debate on sweatshop child labor and consumer freedom. Perreti made public exchanges between himself and Nike over a disagreement. Perreti had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike naturally disagreed. Once this story was made public over Perreti's website it spread worldwide and sparked conversation and dialogue about Nike's use of sweatshops. Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples of cultural jamming like Perreti's are more along the lines of tactics that radical consumer social movements would use. These movements push people to question the taken-for-granted assumption that consuming is natural and good and aim to disrupt the naturalization of consumer culture; they also seek to create systems of production and consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate hypercapitalism. Past mass events and ideas have included "Buy Nothing Day", "Digital Detox Week", virtual sit-ins and protests over the Internet, producing ‘subvertisements’ and placing them in public spaces, and creating and enacting ‘placejamming’ projects where public spaces are reclaimed and nature is re-introduced into urban places.

The most effective form of jamming is to use an already widely recognizable meme to transmit the message. Once viewers are forced to take a second look at the mimicked popular meme they are forced out of their comfort zone. Viewers are presented with another way to view the meme and forced to think about the implications presented by the jammer. More often than not, when this is used as a tactic the jammer is going for shock value. For example, to make consumers aware of the negative body image that big name apparel brands are causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's 'Obsession' was created and played worldwide. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder throwing up into a toilet.

Another way that social consumer movements hope to utilize culture jamming effectively is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image, but does so in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination. An example would be the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters. "True Cost" forced consumers to compare the human labor cost and conditions and environmental drawbacks of products to the sales costs. Another example would be the "Truth" campaigns that frequented television in the past years that exposed the deception tobacco companies used to sell their products.

Culture jamming is sometimes confused with artistic appropriation or with acts of vandalism which have destruction or defacement as their primary goal. Although the end result is not always easily distinguishable from these activities, the intent of those participating in culture jamming differs from that of people whose intent is either artistic or merely destructive. The lines are not always clear-cut; some activities, notably street art, will fall into two or even all three categories.

There have been questions regarding the effectiveness of culture jamming. Some argue that culture jamming is easily co-opted and commodified by the market, which tends to "defuse" its potential for consumer resistance. Others posit that the culture jamming strategy of rhetorical sabotage and easily incorporated and appropriated by clever advertising agencies, and thus is not a very powerful means of social change. Yet others believe that culture jamming is moving beyond mere critique to offering an alternative cultural, social and political economic vision.

Participate in the political process by means of engaging with people as people, regardless of political party. Petition elected politicians. Vote with your conscious those politicians in or out of office. Stockholders demand accountability of corporate officials. Be positive and constructive. Use social networks, blogs, cameras and the human microphone if necessary. This is your village, your community to live and shop, and work and play. Act in your local community and think globally for the rest of us.

R. Buckminster Fuller was an American systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. He published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions and architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.

In 1927 Fuller resolved to think independently which included a commitment to "the search for the principles governing the universe and help advance the evolution of humanity in accordance with them... finding ways of doing more with less to the end that all people everywhere can have more and more." By 1928, Fuller was living in Greenwich Village and spending much of his time at the popular café Romany Marie's. Fuller accepted a job decorating the interior of the café in exchange for meals, giving informal lectures several times a week, and models of the Dymaxion house were exhibited at the café. Isamu Noguchi arrived in New York in 1929 and upon introduction Noguchi and Fuller were soon collaborating on several projects including the modeling of the Dymaxion car.

In the 1930s, Fuller designed and built prototypes of what he hoped would be a safer aerodynamic car, which he called the Dymaxion. Fuller worked with professional colleagues for three years beginning in 1932 on a design idea Fuller had derived from aircraft technologies. The three prototype cars were different from anything being sold at the time. They had three wheels: two front drive wheels and one rear, steered wheel. The engine was in the rear, and the chassis and body were original designs. The aerodynamic, somewhat tear-shaped body was large enough to seat eleven people and was about 18 feet long. All three prototypes were essentially a mini-bus, and its concept long predated the Volkswagen Type 2 mini-bus conceived in 1947 by Ben Pon. Fuller also designed an alternative projection map, called the Dymaxion map. This was designed to show Earth's continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface.

Fuller was a pioneer in thinking globally, and he explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design. He cited François de Chardenedes' opinion that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" has cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon to produce. From this point of view, its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings. Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity."

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet remained optimistic about humanity's future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life," his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" caused him to conclude that at a certain time during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities was not necessary anymore. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness," he declared, "is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.... War is obsolete." He criticized previous utopian schemes as too exclusive, and thought this was a major source of their failure. To work, he thought that a utopia needed to include everyone.

Fuller also claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. One confirming result was that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.

The Geodesic Dome

Fuller was most famous for his lattice shell structured geodesic domes. These have been used as parts of civic buildings, military radar stations, environmental protest camps and exhibition attractions. His famous Geodesic Domes include The EPCOT Center at Florida's Walt Disney World and the US Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair.

Their construction is based on extending some basic principles to build simple "tensegrity" structures (tetrahedron, octahedron, and the closest packing of spheres), making them lightweight and stable. The geodesic dome was a result of Fuller's exploration of nature's constructing principles to find design solutions.

Fuller believed that any true social or political revolution must arise from and encompass design revolution insights, and not just be based upon shallow political rhetoric. Beginning in the 1930s initiatives like the Dymaxion World Map (which gives more accurate representations than traditional maps), the Global Energy Network grid and World Game geostrategic scenarios were promoted by the State of the World Forum and futurists including Robert Anton Wilson, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marshall Savage [Buckminster Fuller by Alex Burns (disinfo.com) - January 26, 2002].

His most popular books, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), Critical Path (1981) and Synergetics (1982) detail the vision of Fuller's philosophy.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space. The spaceship has a finite amount of resources and cannot be resupplied. He introduces idea that the earth is a spaceship with the sun as our energy supplier. "We are all astronauts" says Fuller. The idea of the earth is as a mechanical vehicle that requires maintenance, and that if you do not keep it in good order it will cease to function.

The Great Pirate concept is explained as the source of their power is global information in a time where people are focused locally. Specifically, the Great Pirates are aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the Great Pirates exploit for their own advantage. Power struggles for trade routes ensue, requiring the Pirates establish governments in various areas and support leaders who will defend their trade routes.

Monarchs are encouraged to develop civil service systems to provide secure but specialized employment for their brightest subjects which prevents them from competing with the Great Pirates in their lucrative global trading. Thus the Great Pirates protect the advantages that their unique global perspective revealed.

Critical Path is as relevant now as it was when first published in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity itself created its current situation and the limits of the planet's natural resources and the many challenges of economic, environmental and ethical issues in a modern political world.

Ephemeralization, is a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller. It is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing". Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources. Fuller uses Henry Ford's assembly line as an example of how ephemeralization can continuously lead to better products at lower cost with no upper bound on productivity. Fuller saw ephemeralization as an inevitable trend in human development.

Synergetics is the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components, including humanity’s role as both participant and observer. Since systems are identifiable at every scale from the quantum level to the cosmic, and humanity both articulates the behavior of these systems and is composed of these systems, synergetics is a very broad discipline, and embraces a broad range of scientific and philosophical studies including tetrahedral and close-packed-sphere geometries, thermodynamics, chemistry, psychology, biochemistry, economics, philosophy and theology.

R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, mathematician, philosopher, and individualist. Best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term "Spaceship Earth," his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought.

“I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual….It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.”

Critical Path (1981)

R. Buckminster Fuller

Plato (428-348 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher and teacher. Born in Athens, he was a student and friend of Socrates (470-399 B.C.). From Socrates he learned the dialectic method of conversation that derives knowledge. Plato wrote about twenty books or dialogues and "The Allegory of the Cave", from the Republic, Book VII, is the most famous.

Imagine men living in an underground cave. They have been there since childhood, and are chained, facing a wall on which shadows are cast from a fire above and behind them. They were prevented by the chains from moving their heads. Men project shadow images of statues, vessels and figures of animals, onto the wall before the prisoners. One man succeeds in escaping from the cave to the light of the sun. For the first time he sees real objects and realizes that he had been deceived by shadows. He goes back to liberate the other prisoners and enlighten them to the truth. However, he has difficulty in persuading them because coming out of the sunlight, his eyesight was unfocused and could not clearly distinguish the shadows. The enlightened man seemed less perceptive than before his escape. Indeed, says Plato, "if they could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him."

Plato's philosophy considers the difference between reality and appearance. What appears to be true and what exist independent of the human mind as two separate realities. This can be simplified into terms of knowledge and opinion. Knowledge is an understanding or awareness that recognizes a truth or fact. This occurs by experience directly through perception of our senses or indirectly with scientific instruments, or logic and reason.

What can happen when two cultures come into contact with each other? The Types of Cultural Interaction are: 1. Cultural Pluralism (cooperative/consensus). Cultures coexist with each other as equals and are preserved. This is more ideal than real. 2. Cultural Competition (rivalry), two or more cultures compete with an accepted system of values that doesn't include the destruction of the other. This is more typical. 3. Cultural Conflict (coercion) consist of interaction between two or more cultures whereby the differences are so great that one culture tends to dominate and/or eliminate the others against their will. 4. Cultural Accommodation. The reduction of conflict and the restoration of peaceful interaction through compromise, mediation, and toleration. 5. Cultural Assimilation. The process whereby people of different cultural backgrounds come to share the same cultural values and goals.

The history of art is a direct way to correlate everything one has ever learned. By understanding how artistic styles modified the environment, one can achieve a better comprehension of past civilizations and emulate patterns in our present culture. Picasso, possibly the most important single figure in modern art, has constantly changed his personal style and has introduced intellectual and subjective elements of modern art into his work. He thus maintained his position as a creative and active force. To experience the initial illusion and the overcoming of illusion, the mind's self-awareness is the achievement and return to the nature of reality. Weltgeist, the world mind of Hegel, the German idealist philosopher, extends beyond the confines of human experience.

As a general principle, evolutionary logic has a profound significance in all areas of scientific analysis and design. The society in which gathering, processing and distribution of information play central role needs its own art forms. These forms should take into account information behaviors and information interfaces employed by people in their daily life, such use of the internet for entertainment, commerce, and education. Information tools and information interfaces is the future of aesthetics. In contrast, we are told, art is non-functional. Art historically has been used to propagate various ideologies but artists also taught people how to interact with complex bodies of information. History of art is the history of information research. The logic of these forms into the realm of design, architecture and art. Modernists artists treated a figurative image as an abstraction, a collection of shapes, colors, lines which are arranged together and which also happen to represent some familiar reality. Consider the beautiful abstract patterns of fractals in the physical world of nature, network mapping in cyberspace and social networking.

At this turning point in human history, society is transcending the limits of national sovereignty of a world community. The world's population will be over eight billion. The rate of population increase will have begun to decelerate due to the widespread acceptance of cheap and effective means of birth control. People will mostly live in urbane complexes, surrounded by numerous machines. In particular, new databases, applications, and electronic libraries with fully automated access. A credit/debit card economy in which cash may be virtually eliminated. Cell phones with GPS and bluetooth, MP3 players, Touchpads and other personal and mobile devices facilitate communications with persons everywhere.

In geographies of the information society what is cyberspace? Political structures and space surveillance, organizational and employment restructuring, cultural and social geographies of place, community and identity. The globalization of trade, urban, regional and global restructuring.

The movement to worldwide free trade economic considerations transcending political consideration, developing telecommunications and an advancement of democracy and the spread of free enterprise. Economic power is more important than military power in determining a nation's influence.

Futurists imagine a grand vision of modern self-sustainable cities, automated, computer planned and eco-friendly. This may appear to be a utopian perfection in our near future but this is one path that stands before us. Let there be many others. By learning from the past our lives benefit through acts of creation, invention and ingenuity, the future we build is the world we live today. A resource based economic model is more about resource procurement and allocation than method of payment. As the twentieth century can attest technology like the laws of politics and of financial reward of men can lead to either spiritual development and economic freedom or tyranny and enslavement.

The choice is yours.

-Kyle Levine

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

New Media Report: Culture Jamming and The Occupy Movement