new media cultures

The lecture we had on surveillance technology really interested me, for something that constantly surrounds us on a daily basis, it was an area of new media technology that I never really thought about. It wasn’t until we started discussing exactly how surveillance affects our lives that I realised how much its importance had grown. Today we are constantly monitored throughout everything we do, be it walking down the street, shopping or even being a work. It is said that on an average day we are caught on one CCTV camera or another many more times than you would expect.

But even though the use of such technologies I seen by many people to be a modern development, the practice of ‘keeping an eye’ on society isn’t a new concept at all. Back in 1916 Ford sent social workers round to the houses of his employees, ensuring that they were meeting his expected standards, both in terms of family life and morality, among many other specifications. Even though this isn’t really on the same level as the monitoring that goes on in the work place today, it does run along the same lines, the idea behind the practice is the same.

Today such technologies have been put into place so that workforces are constantly measured, watched and placed in to league tables. Even single transactions by individual workers are often kept on record. I work in a bar and at the beginning and end of every shift I have to sign in and out, then each individual person is given specific till numbers. This allows us to log into the tills and carry out sales, but more importantly perhaps, it lets the management know exactly what each of us is selling at any particular time. Even such a small thing like a till receipt roll can give a huge amount of information, it can show busy periods and popular products, briefly giving an insight into our customers. Information like this is often used to rank workers in order of performance, although my workplace doesn’t do this, my sister also works in a bar in Whitehaven, there they have a board in the staff room displaying the top 10 workers each week, ranking one colleague against another. Each of these features is part of the surveillance society we are living in.

After the seminar I was walking home, talking to Sarah about how we are monitored in society. We started talking about the security cameras in high street shops, I was shocked when a member of the class told us how sensitive the security cameras in stores are, saying how they could even read credit card details from inside a purse if it was opened. So then I thought that if they could read something as small as that, then they can surely read things like text massages and phone numbers off a mobile if it was being used in the shop. You never really think of small, private things like that being watched, but they obviously are, almost everything we do can be watched by one thing or another. Mobile phones tracked down, personal messages recorded and credit card use kept an eye on.

All parts of our lives are constantly watched and recorded, from birth certificate to death certificate, everything we do is monitored. Cameras watch our every move, be it high street CCTV cameras, security surveillance or satellites watching down on us from space. When reading through my lecture notes I found this quote from Virilio that sums up exactly what I’ve been talking about;

“now our cities are bathed in a constant wash on electromagnetic
and microwave radiations and signals, transmitting and receiving,
constantly moderated, tracked, assembled, disassembled
and monitored. The boundaries of the city become indiscernible,
they are at once internalised by the inhabitants and simultaneously
manifest everywhere.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Los Angeles. LA is segmented into clearly separated areas, the rich occupying one part of the city whilst the other part is lived in by migrant or poor workers. Each part of the city is closely monitored, the police department, along with other leading organisations, wanting to keep the two worlds as far apart as possible. The LA police department is actually one of the best equipped military forces on earth, it has access to state of the art systems, a 50 vehicle helicopter force and the Emergency Command Control Communication System, giving complete autonomy of operation. But not only is police security tight, many homes in LA cost in excess of $5 million, so home security is also at the top of the range. With an increased development in technology personal security in the home is closely focused on. Yet again this is just another form of high technology surveillance.

This weekend I went down to London with a group of friends, we went to see a performance in Camden, but I thought that while down there I would drag them along to the Tate Modern….along with Carsten Holler’s slides, there was a UBS photography exhibition on, an area of the arts in which I have always been interested by. It focused on the realist photography of the 1990s, a time when photography became a much more established art form. The range of photographs exhibited showed the hugely diverse range of options available with the camera, there were clearly staged photographs hung right next to snap shots of everyday life, moments in time that were captured perfectly and made into works of art. But even though there was such a wide range of pieces each photograph I saw interested me. The colours of Andreas Gursky’s 99 cent drew me right into the picture, the thought that he saw something so interesting in this view that he decided to share it with the art world, a situation many people all over the world experience everyday, yet it was Gursky who saw its potential.

This work is connected with one of the photographers we were looking at during the seminar, Pedro Meyer, through his photography he tries to produce something miraculous from the everyday. Here you can see how Gursky has seen the potential for art in a supermarket, so much so that his photograph has ended up as part of the UBS collection.

Whilst walking round the exhibition I started thinking about the seminar we had on digital aesthetics, and how we were discussing the disposability of photography today, how it was made available to the public through Kodak’s Box Brownie camera. All in all it inspired me to carry out a little experiment, I wanted to see the difference between the types of photographs I would take depending on the camera I was using. So I went shopping and bought myself a throw away WOW camera from Kodak, for the rest of that day I decided to use my disposable camera rather than my digital camera, and the next day I would switch back. I just wanted to see if there was a huge difference between the photos taken with each camera….unfortunately I will have to share my findings next time as the WOW camera is currently being developed. The first set back of more old fashioned photography I guess.

In this module we have been looking at different forms of new media and how this has an effect on our everyday experiences as well as the more uncommon aspects of our lives. In the first seminar we started to discuss the many forms in which new media can take place, this opened my eyes to the whole subject as I hadn't previously realised how much my life relies on media and communication, even if the whole concept sometimes baffles me.

As I got thinking about the new media cultures we had been talking about I began to see the huge links with communication and how new forms of technological media have pushed communication into a new realm. Communication is now, more than ever, a huge part of everybody’s lives. We communicate to the world on a daily basis and the world communicates to us, be it through advertisements or newspapers, just to name a couple. But the communication tends to be much more ephemeral, very rarely are newly made adverts preserved or remembered for much longer than a couple of weeks at the most. The same is true for personal media communication, text messages we receive may cheer us up or simply tell us something, but when our inbox’s get full we delete them and don’t think twice about it. It seems that even though the quantity of communication in ours lives has greatly increased, the same quality has been lost.

After thinking about this I began to read through the inbox on my phone and found some messages that instantly made me smile, I thought that sooner or later these messages were going to be lost along with the rest. So I decided to save them, I didn’t want to think that I may forget about them.

New media cultures are intended to be expansive, they are supposed to allow us to enter a free and almost escapist world. In many senses this is true, technology has brought us the internet, allowing us communicate with the whole world at the touch of a button. We are now able to globalise our culture and peek into other ways of living with great ease, but contrary to what we may believe the internet Isn't totally allowing free speach, many of the websites we visit have already been censored for our viewing, this is taken to a more extreme level in countries like China, where even everyday search engines such as google are regulated, so that they only bring up results the government want thier people to see. But the internet does have many bonuses, there are many site now, such as blog.co.uk or myspace.com that allow everyone to show the world their own personal interests. it can be a great way of communicating and meeting new freinds, but only if you have the know how. Most of my friends have a myspace page and they are constantly badgering to get one, and although I feel like I should I have no idea how to go about setting one up, the fact that I've managed to set up this blog amazes me.

Hopefully sooner rather than later i will feel confident enough with my computer to create a myspace or facebook page and join in with the rest of the world.