What are they?
flash mob
Recap
In my last post I spoke about Improv Everywhere and to what extent it fit this ideal of mass, anyone, anywhere participation. At the end of that post, I came to the conclusion that ultimately, these flash mob groups that make claims of mass, anybody, participation are inherently closed.
“Max? I hope you know what you are doing”
Hey. I need a little help. Let me explain.
So with great apprehension, Mushon has allowed me to alter our little blog outside of his controlled experiment. As you may notice to the right of every page, just below the tags, but above the authors and calendar, a chatbox, which looks something like this:
Looking at embedding structures within New Media Platforms
“The Trap” speaks about how latent systems that underly our society today came to in many way define our actions and thoughts. And while some of these situations were the end result of politically motivated (or individually motivated) decisions, we as users (and researchers) need to be very aware of the media systems we create when we use the web to spread information. With old media, people are very aware of these hidden forces, as the media was “mass,” controlled by highly controlled and monitored industries and government bodies. With the web, people imagined that they were gaining as sort of freedom from large, controlling bureaucracies, an individualized set of media which was self administered, and completely self-selected, so individuals who wished to be exposed to simply and “independent source” could completely circumvent the old way of disseminating information. However, much like turning research of Psychiatry to a calculated end-product, we need to look to these underlying systems which we take as transparent and without politic and reassess whether that algorithm that feeds us “socially picked news” (Reddit, Digg) or even the way in which different blogging platforms effect how each post is ultimatly understood by an end use. While people discuss the merrits of popular blogging scripts such as Wordpress, Movable Type, or Blogger, not many people consider what that software may enherintly add or subtract to the messages being broadcast. In the world of new media, the platforms become the media itself, and we are left with a channel of almost infinite different media each with their own subtleties which carry loaded messages, which are almost more dangerous as they are hidden from view. The systems we build to help us to do sometime need to be kept in check in fear that they become the reason we do something.
