Communication technologies are not always the benign force or indeed a neutral medium that software companies would like us to believe. The word cyberwar describes the use of technology in conflicts and espionage. We have witnessed the use of technology in conflicts like the two Gulf Wars and in the Balkans. Government agencies have generally lost control of the development of such technologies and so the private sector has stepped into its role. Such loss of control is viewed as a serious threat to the security of the nation state, the financial centres and military institutions.
We may think of war as being physical and throughout history we see in battles the use of conventional weapons: swords, guns and bombs. The programme argues that the conventions of warfare had not really changed between the times of Julius Caesar and the Battle of Waterloo. Mechanization of the military revolutionised war in the 20th Century radically changed the nature of conflict, yet today, it is not just the nuclear deterrent or new missile weapons systems that protect us from attack, but also the computer and its protection software. The attack comes from a hacker whose aim is to disrupt communication and information systems. This may seem the stuff of science fiction and thrillers (one thinks of films like Hackers or The Net, both from 1995), but these attacks are a regular occurrence. During the late nineties the conflicts in Kosova and Bosnia, America’s military industrial complex and many universities (MIT was one victim) were hacked by the Serb secret service and Serbian students.
Recently, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on how the internet can spread freedom around the world. It has been seen as a response to Google’s withdrawal from China due to alleged cyber attacks on human rights activists. Before Clinton made her speech, Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer specialising in cases against repressive governments, and Tom Watson MP, discussed how the internet is used by rogue governments on the Today programme, Radio 4. Tom Watson raised the problem in House of Commons.
Robert Amsterdam agreed with the idea of the web being used to “promote freedom” and supports Google’s position. He also proposes that “we” should monitor the ways in which oppressive governments use the web to stifle debate and free expression and also notes how Western companies and multi nationals are complicit in supplying regimes with technical support. Tom Watson noted that the “Internet is a neutral tool that can be used for good and bad”. Watson suggests that democracies should attempt to restrict China and other totalitarian regimes access to communication technologies. While Twitter and Face Book has been used in Iran as technologies of opposition and change, we have also seen repressive regimes use the Internet as a technology of control to monitor dissent.
Sources:
Davies, Simon Big Brother: Britain's web of surveillance and the new technological order London: Pan, 1997
Donk, Wim van de (ed.), foreword by Peter Dahlgren Cyberprotest: new media, citizens and social movements, London New York: Routledge, 2004
Lyon, David, Surveillance society: monitoring everyday life Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001
McCaughey, Martha & Ayers Michael D. (ed.) Cyberactivism: online activism in theory and practice, New York London: Routledge, 2003
Meikle, G Future active: media activism and the internet New York London: Routledge, 2002
Web resources:
Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer specialising in cases against repressive governments, and Tom Watson MP, a prominent blogger who has tabled an Early Day Motion on the Google-China issue, discuss how the internet is used by rogue governments. Today: Thursday 21st January 0835: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8471000/8471658.stm
BBC News: “China Blocking Google” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2231101.stm
“Google censors itself for China”: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4645596.stm
“Web inventor warns of 'dark' net” By Jonathan Fildes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5009250.stm
“Berners-Lee on the read/write web”: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4132752.stm
Listen to "Web inventor's future fears": 'The British developer of the world wide web says he is worried about the way it could be used to spread "misinformation".' Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke to Pallab Ghosh on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 2 Nov 2006
“Defending online freedom” Guardian Online:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/22/hillary-clinton-online-freedom#start-of-comments
Wired Online: “China Restores Google.com”: www.wired.com/news/politics/0,71121-0.html
Showing posts with label Media Technologies and Public Spheres. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media Technologies and Public Spheres. Show all posts
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Culture and Communication
A little note on communication: All designers are concerned with communication. Designers use a variety of visual languages that have there own codes and conventions to express ideas. These ideas can be expressed both/either consciously and/or unconsciously. John Fiske has stated that there ‘are broadly two types of definition of communication. The first sees it as a process by which A sends a message to B upon whom it has an effect. The second sees it as a negotiation and exchange of meaning in which messages, peoples-in-cultures and ‘reality’ interact so as to enable meaning to occur’ (O’Sullivan, 1994, p. 50).
I have in previous posts discussed the Internet and the World Wide Web as communication tools and as social condensers. From Soviet constructivist theory, the social condenser is a spatial idea practiced in architecture. Central to the idea of the social condenser is the premise that architecture has the ability to influence social behaviour (as discussed in Shock of the New episode 4, “Trouble in Utopia”). It may be argued that the ‘architecture’ of the WWW, a ‘public space’, breaks down perceived social hierarchies and creates an environment that allows and encourages disparate groups and communities to interact. We can explore how real and virtual communities formed and sustained. In 1997 Microsoft set up a project: ‘MSN Street’ in which the residents of a North London road were given computers and free access to the Internet.
These communication technologies can impact on communities in many different ways. In the rural Western Isles of Scotland, this communication technology is used to keep traditional communities together. It also helps to develop new communities: today we may think of My Space or Second Life amongst many others.
Tom Standage the author of The Victorian Internet (1998), points to the features common to both the telegraph networks of the 19th Century and today’s Internet (Standage was on the reading list for Week one of Media Technologies and Public spheres). He compares them both in terms of the speed of communication, their commercial possibilities, the utopian notion of connectivity and the transcendence of national and political boundaries. These viewpoints are not too dissimilar to Marshall McLuhan’s (1911-80) claim that the new electronic media would restore our sense of community and collectivity creating what he called a ‘global village’.
However communication is not simply about information, surely? Is it not about social grooming and our increasing ability to talk might not have been (or should that be just been?)about helping one another understand the world, but a guard against lying.
Further reading:
Bell, David J. [et al.], Cyberculture: the key concepts London: Routledge, 2004 303.4834 bel
Kiesler, Sara (ed) Culture of the Internet Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1997
Nayar, Pramod K. Virtual worlds: culture and politics in the age of cybertechnology
New Delhi London Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2004
O’Sullivan, T et al, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies London: Routledge, 1994 2002
Preece, Jenny, Online communities: designing usability, supporting sociability New York: Wiley, 2000 e
Spender, Dale Nattering on the net: women, power and cyberspace North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1995
Websites:
Tom Standage’s Home Page: www.tomstandage.com
I have in previous posts discussed the Internet and the World Wide Web as communication tools and as social condensers. From Soviet constructivist theory, the social condenser is a spatial idea practiced in architecture. Central to the idea of the social condenser is the premise that architecture has the ability to influence social behaviour (as discussed in Shock of the New episode 4, “Trouble in Utopia”). It may be argued that the ‘architecture’ of the WWW, a ‘public space’, breaks down perceived social hierarchies and creates an environment that allows and encourages disparate groups and communities to interact. We can explore how real and virtual communities formed and sustained. In 1997 Microsoft set up a project: ‘MSN Street’ in which the residents of a North London road were given computers and free access to the Internet.
These communication technologies can impact on communities in many different ways. In the rural Western Isles of Scotland, this communication technology is used to keep traditional communities together. It also helps to develop new communities: today we may think of My Space or Second Life amongst many others.
Tom Standage the author of The Victorian Internet (1998), points to the features common to both the telegraph networks of the 19th Century and today’s Internet (Standage was on the reading list for Week one of Media Technologies and Public spheres). He compares them both in terms of the speed of communication, their commercial possibilities, the utopian notion of connectivity and the transcendence of national and political boundaries. These viewpoints are not too dissimilar to Marshall McLuhan’s (1911-80) claim that the new electronic media would restore our sense of community and collectivity creating what he called a ‘global village’.
However communication is not simply about information, surely? Is it not about social grooming and our increasing ability to talk might not have been (or should that be just been?)about helping one another understand the world, but a guard against lying.
Further reading:
Bell, David J. [et al.], Cyberculture: the key concepts London: Routledge, 2004 303.4834 bel
Kiesler, Sara (ed) Culture of the Internet Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1997
Nayar, Pramod K. Virtual worlds: culture and politics in the age of cybertechnology
New Delhi London Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2004
O’Sullivan, T et al, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies London: Routledge, 1994 2002
Preece, Jenny, Online communities: designing usability, supporting sociability New York: Wiley, 2000 e
Spender, Dale Nattering on the net: women, power and cyberspace North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1995
Websites:
Tom Standage’s Home Page: www.tomstandage.com
Cyberculture to E-Culture (sounds so late eighties early 90s)? Erm... Towards E-topia? Part 2
The WWW over the years seems to shift from being a new frontier, a wild west as one writer put it, to something that resembles a property developer’s paradise. Is Tim Berners-Lee’s utopian vision and rather altruistic outlook being challenged by the giant software companies, international corporations and governments eager to control the flow of information? Certainly over the years, governments have attempted curtail “free-speech” on the web. In a previous post I said that Tony Benn championed the use of Internet and web technologies. I saw an interview where he discussed other means of communication, which were ‘nationalised’ by a government: during the reformation, Henry VIII placed a priest in every pulpit to say exactly what the king wanted his people to hear and during the reign of Charles II the postal service was established. The web, he argued was for the people and so counters the official language of institutions and governmental agencies. The web’s pluralistic and multi-vocal nature makes this a radical communication system, that ‘undermines the borders of national identity’, central authority and erodes ‘the old distinctions between public and private self’ (Ward, 1997, 2003 pp. 124-5). Its ability to transcend boundaries has led to it to be described as the first postmodern medium.
In the mid to late nineties we saw the struggle between Netscape and Microsoft for control of the Web. Controlling the means of communication controls the information that flows through it. Companies like Reuters have always appreciated the importance of technology in the distribution of information. Microsoft attempted to create an alternative web with MSN (Microsoft Network). This essentially failed. The creation of Explorer, Microsoft’s browser, challenged the dominance of Netscape. This led to disagreements over technical protocols and certainly Microsoft’s early actions have been interpreted as an attempt to curtail the freedom of the user and the eclectic and anarchic nature of the web, with Microsoft pushing it’s own ideas about protocols that were/are different from everyone else’s. These technical difficulties have been largely resolved through the dedication of people like Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org). Microsoft’s business practices have been questioned and it’s monopoly of the operating system and web browser market that has in the words of some commentators led to a monoculture, has been attacked in court. This did not lead to a break up of the company, but recently Mozilla Firefox has challenged Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market.
New Scientist: “Microsoft monoculture allows virus spread” 25 September 2003: www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4203
In the mid to late nineties we saw the struggle between Netscape and Microsoft for control of the Web. Controlling the means of communication controls the information that flows through it. Companies like Reuters have always appreciated the importance of technology in the distribution of information. Microsoft attempted to create an alternative web with MSN (Microsoft Network). This essentially failed. The creation of Explorer, Microsoft’s browser, challenged the dominance of Netscape. This led to disagreements over technical protocols and certainly Microsoft’s early actions have been interpreted as an attempt to curtail the freedom of the user and the eclectic and anarchic nature of the web, with Microsoft pushing it’s own ideas about protocols that were/are different from everyone else’s. These technical difficulties have been largely resolved through the dedication of people like Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org). Microsoft’s business practices have been questioned and it’s monopoly of the operating system and web browser market that has in the words of some commentators led to a monoculture, has been attacked in court. This did not lead to a break up of the company, but recently Mozilla Firefox has challenged Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market.
New Scientist: “Microsoft monoculture allows virus spread” 25 September 2003: www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4203
Cyberculture to E-Culture (sounds so late eighties early 90s)? Erm... Towards E-topia? Part 1
At the moment I sense a creeping technological determinism in my writing. From John Berger’s discussion of television, film, photography and oil painting to the more recent programmes on the virtual revolution, we see the ways in which technology seems to shape our perception of the world around us and shapes ‘our’ culture and helps us re-present reality. Like Vertov’s ‘mechanical eye’, which was ‘free… for today and forever from human immobility’ (Berger, 1972 p.12) our ‘eyes’ can travel immense distances through networks of the World Wide Web and the Internet. We can now visit the Grand Canyon on our computer screens via Google Earth.
There is another invention that radically changed European culture and politics, an ‘ancestor’ of the WWW: the European technology of printing and moveable type, in the 15th Century by Johannes Gutenberg. This technology was a key development in the Renaissance and became a major factor in the Reformation. To those privileged to read (remember most Europeans of the fifteenth century were illiterate), all world knowledge in the west resided in two sets of texts: The Bible and the works of Aristotle. Today, we throw the equivalent amount of information into the recycling bin after we have finished with our Sunday newspaper. How many words exist on the WWW? It is also important to note that in the 15th Century ‘our’ main source of information came from village gossip, art and the pulpit.
Tim Berners-Lee, the ‘inventor’ of the web and the HTML code (of course he had a little help from Ted Nelson who devised hypertext), has on a number of occasions explained his role as inventor and as an observer and commentator of its use and rapid expansion. The Internet was initially invented the 1960s, a product of the military-industrial complex to allow scientists and the military to share information and maintain communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Post cold war, from being a tool of largely governmental agencies the Internet quickly became a global network.
The idea of a global network of easily accessible information is a product of liberal capitalism and a democratic society. These inventions have created a virtual soapbox, where theoretically everyone has the right to publish: a right to free speech. Tony Benn the ex-labour MP, sees the Internet/WWW as something that is beyond the control of governments. However, since many sites are unedited there is the threat of misinformation and for the potential circulation of dangerous ideas.
There is another invention that radically changed European culture and politics, an ‘ancestor’ of the WWW: the European technology of printing and moveable type, in the 15th Century by Johannes Gutenberg. This technology was a key development in the Renaissance and became a major factor in the Reformation. To those privileged to read (remember most Europeans of the fifteenth century were illiterate), all world knowledge in the west resided in two sets of texts: The Bible and the works of Aristotle. Today, we throw the equivalent amount of information into the recycling bin after we have finished with our Sunday newspaper. How many words exist on the WWW? It is also important to note that in the 15th Century ‘our’ main source of information came from village gossip, art and the pulpit.
Tim Berners-Lee, the ‘inventor’ of the web and the HTML code (of course he had a little help from Ted Nelson who devised hypertext), has on a number of occasions explained his role as inventor and as an observer and commentator of its use and rapid expansion. The Internet was initially invented the 1960s, a product of the military-industrial complex to allow scientists and the military to share information and maintain communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Post cold war, from being a tool of largely governmental agencies the Internet quickly became a global network.
The idea of a global network of easily accessible information is a product of liberal capitalism and a democratic society. These inventions have created a virtual soapbox, where theoretically everyone has the right to publish: a right to free speech. Tony Benn the ex-labour MP, sees the Internet/WWW as something that is beyond the control of governments. However, since many sites are unedited there is the threat of misinformation and for the potential circulation of dangerous ideas.
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
The Intended Audience for my Work
The imagined audience would be an educated bourgeoisie. After the experience of the Media Technologies and Public Spheres unit this may seem to be a somewhat limited aim.
Saturday, 13 February 2010
The ‘Architecture’ of the Web: Digital Utopias and Dystopias
"It’s a strange day
No colours or shapes
No sound in my head
I forget who I am
When I’m with you
There’s no reason
There’s no sense
I’m not supposed to feel
I forget who I am
I forget
Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia
My dog needs new ears
Make his eyes see forever
Make him live like me
Again and again
I’m wired to the world
That’s how I know everything
I’m super brain
That’s how they made me"
Utopia by Goldfrapp.
Ideas pertaining to the ‘modern movement’ in architecture can be used to inform many of the debates and ideas that now surround the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 and indeed Media Studies 2.0.
There is a sense of post-modern euphoria that we have broken free from the past and that old modernist theories are as redundant as their hierarchies of class, culture and taste, to name but three; we have reached some kind of e-topia. These utopian concepts partly came out of the sixties counter culture that reacted against modernism’s perceived authoritarianism- one thinks of Apple, a product of Californian sunshine and LSD, offering us an alternative world, a technological vision with a Byrdsian soundtrack, an alternative to the grey corporatism of the monolithic and historically dubious IBM. In eschewing modernist theories along with all the modernist inequities, are we in danger of throwing the theoretical baby out with the modernist bathwater?
In fact, the optimism surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web as a communications tool has modernist utopian overtones, because modernism itself was, to many modernists, also a utopia. The web can be seen as a social condenser. The social condenser is a Soviet Constructivist theory about architectural space and how it has the ability to influence behaviour. Does not the ‘architecture’ of the WWW, a public space, break down perceived hierarchies and create an environment that allows and encourages communities to interact? Looked at this way, the computer becomes the liberation machine in a similar vein to modernism’s architectural ‘machines for living’ that were meant to somehow improve us.
There are also ideas pertaining to the pre-psychedelia, 1950s modernism of the International Typographical Style and its demand for clarity in design that are useful to us when trying to articulate the utopian nature of the Web. In web design Usability Heuristics demands similar things from its designers. The doctrine of usability suggests that with usability comes sociability.
With post-modern utopian notions of connectivity and the transcendence of national, institutional and political boundaries, are we being starry eyed in our optimism, or should we be harking back to the days of clean lines and Soviet-style functionality? The belief that new media benefit society through their attack on perceived hierarchies, and that the web is a great leveller, can be countered by the equally valid argument that the Web is undermining intellectual authority, generating failed spaces that are hostile, that threaten individual and collective security and help to circulate false information and dangerous ideas.
Is the computer best understood, then, with reference to modernist or post-modernist ideas of utopia's and dystopia's?
No colours or shapes
No sound in my head
I forget who I am
When I’m with you
There’s no reason
There’s no sense
I’m not supposed to feel
I forget who I am
I forget
Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia
My dog needs new ears
Make his eyes see forever
Make him live like me
Again and again
I’m wired to the world
That’s how I know everything
I’m super brain
That’s how they made me"
Utopia by Goldfrapp.
Ideas pertaining to the ‘modern movement’ in architecture can be used to inform many of the debates and ideas that now surround the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 and indeed Media Studies 2.0.
"1984" Apple Macintosh Advertisement directed by Ridley Scott
There is a sense of post-modern euphoria that we have broken free from the past and that old modernist theories are as redundant as their hierarchies of class, culture and taste, to name but three; we have reached some kind of e-topia. These utopian concepts partly came out of the sixties counter culture that reacted against modernism’s perceived authoritarianism- one thinks of Apple, a product of Californian sunshine and LSD, offering us an alternative world, a technological vision with a Byrdsian soundtrack, an alternative to the grey corporatism of the monolithic and historically dubious IBM. In eschewing modernist theories along with all the modernist inequities, are we in danger of throwing the theoretical baby out with the modernist bathwater?
In fact, the optimism surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web as a communications tool has modernist utopian overtones, because modernism itself was, to many modernists, also a utopia. The web can be seen as a social condenser. The social condenser is a Soviet Constructivist theory about architectural space and how it has the ability to influence behaviour. Does not the ‘architecture’ of the WWW, a public space, break down perceived hierarchies and create an environment that allows and encourages communities to interact? Looked at this way, the computer becomes the liberation machine in a similar vein to modernism’s architectural ‘machines for living’ that were meant to somehow improve us.
There are also ideas pertaining to the pre-psychedelia, 1950s modernism of the International Typographical Style and its demand for clarity in design that are useful to us when trying to articulate the utopian nature of the Web. In web design Usability Heuristics demands similar things from its designers. The doctrine of usability suggests that with usability comes sociability.
With post-modern utopian notions of connectivity and the transcendence of national, institutional and political boundaries, are we being starry eyed in our optimism, or should we be harking back to the days of clean lines and Soviet-style functionality? The belief that new media benefit society through their attack on perceived hierarchies, and that the web is a great leveller, can be countered by the equally valid argument that the Web is undermining intellectual authority, generating failed spaces that are hostile, that threaten individual and collective security and help to circulate false information and dangerous ideas.
Is the computer best understood, then, with reference to modernist or post-modernist ideas of utopia's and dystopia's?
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Civilisation 10: The Smile of Reason: 3
"Those who haven't lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of life" Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord.
The salon represented a form resistance against an autocratic king and a centralised and authoritarian government. They brought together the brightest intellects of France. There aim was to transform society. One of the ways of countering the excesses of a king was to engage with the writing of an encyclopaedia that would accurately define words and counter the official language, the language of an authoritarian government.
Clark travels to Scotland to discuss the great names in in the world of ideas and science: Adam smith, David Hume, Joseph Black and James Watt. These 18th Century Scots help to transform the whole current of European thought and life.
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Civilisation 10: The Smile of Reason: 1
“The Smile of Reason” explores the period from the enlightenment to the English, American and French and industrial revolutions and the rise of republicanism. Kenneth Clark traces the ideological journey which led from the great palaces at Blenheim and Versailles to Jefferson's Monticello.
We begin this episode with the Enlightenment and the philosopher Voltaire. Clark observes that "although the victory of reason and tolerance was won in France, it was initiated in England" (Clark, 1969 p. 246)
Clark, K (1969) Civilisation: A personal view, London: BBC/J. Murray
Monday, 7 December 2009
Modernism, Modernity and Modernité: Omissions and Corrections.
Modernity is a word that is often used as an overarching periodizing term to denote a historical era. In my first comments regarding this I do make this clear, however I stated that we began with 18th Century Enlightenment, something that is true, but ignores some aspects of modernity’s development that starts in earlier centuries. I did not emphasis that Modernity refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period. So in a way we may begin somewhere in the Renaissance with the marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism) towards capitalism in say 14th Century Florence or even earlier. In England we saw the power of the King challenged by parliament leading to the English Civil War. At this point around 1650 we witness the development of the Public Sphere and opening of the first coffee house in Oxford. It is perhaps important to note that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and Denis Diderot is said to have written parts of the Encyclopédie in a coffee house. The coffee house becomes the great social condenser of 18th Century France, helping to break down class barriers. This is discussed in Adam Hart Davis’ Eureka Years http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b00cdvk0. Modernity also means a shift towards industrialization, secularization, rationalization and the nation-state. So we see an overarching period from the Renaissance to Enlightenment or Age of Reason, to the Age of Revolutions (American, Industrial, French, 1848, Russian) concluding Post WWII, especially after 1968.
Modernité is concerned with a distinctly modern sense of dislocation and ambiguity and locates it in the more general experience of the aestheticization of everyday life, as exemplified in the ephemeral and transitory qualities of an urban culture shaped by the imperatives of fashion, consumerism, and constant innovation. Here one may consider Baudelaire, Manet or Toulouse Lautrec.
Modernism describes the art, culture, design and style of a historical period: the Modern Age or Modernity. The term is used by Charles Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century to designate a new field of action for the artist. For Baudelaire it describes the culture of the “modern world” or bourgeois industrial society. It is about what is new in one’s own culture and implied an obligation to be of one’s own time. The exact character of this age, as well as its precise dates (although generally speaking the mid -19th Century is often cited as a start date), are described in very different ways by critics and historians (see Richard Kostelanetz and Robert Hughes amongst many others). I think it is fair to say that modernism can vary from country to country and varies from practice to practice Modernist theatre, film, art, photography; design may begin at very different times. Anyway, modernism is often associated with faith in: progress, optimism, rationalism and clarity of communication in some contexts. With the early days of modernism there was the utopian belief that mechanization and technology if properly channelled could produce a less divided society, perhaps by the seventies and eighties this started to look absurd. The end of modernism corresponds with the “collapse” of modernity: the architecture historian Charles Jenks gives us the year 1972 and even the exact minute of the collapse (I mean this literally) of modernism and the modern movement with the destruction of Pruitt–Igoe the housing complex designed by Minoru Yamasaki. I think that it was Robert Hughes in The New Shock of the New that refers to 9/11 as modernisms final moments. The World Trade Centre was also designed by Minoru Yamasaki.
Media Technologies and Public Spheres: 2
The second session Wednesday 7 October , 2009: 'The Media and Modernity: Mediation, Technology, Change'.
Here are some of my thoughts on Modernism and Modernity:
The adjective modern refers to the contemporaneous. So in terms of art, all art is modern to those who make it, whether they are the inhabitants of Renaissance Florence or present day Lincoln. Specifically the term Modern refers to a historical period from the mid 19th century to the nineteen seventies. The exact end date for modernism is up for debate, but we could argue the the 1970s represented the beginning of the end.
Modernism is a critical approach that stresses innovation over all criteria. It is characterised by a radical attitude toward both the past and present. Historically we begin in the 18th Century and the Enlightenment and then at a period that has often been called the Age of Revolution (American, French and Industrial) and then in 1848 the year of the Chartists and the revolutions that swept Europe changing peoples attitude to contemporary life. Crucial to the development of modernism was the break down of traditional of financial power-the church, the state, and the aristocratic elite. This meant that artists were more independent and so free to determine the content of their art, refusing to depict paintings with mythological, religious and historical themes (often referred to as Academic Art). Modernism was widely, but not exclusively associated with life in an industrialised society and was often distinguished by its celebration of technology and science (challenged by many modern artists after 1914). Modern Art arose as part of Western society’s attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged from the 19th century. Modern design emerged as a reaction against the declining standards of craftsmanship and to the Art Nouveau movement from the 1880s onwards. Many practitioners recognized the need for new approaches that would enable the mass production of well-made artefacts for mass consumption. It was believed that mechanization and technology, if properly channelled, could change society for the better. Progress seems to be a key word here when in art we see one style succeed another in quick succession. In the late 19th Century and early Twentieth Century we see the content of art shift from realism and naturalism to spirituality, the celebration of technology, the evocation of primitivism and the emptying of art of all identifiable forms. So Modernism cannot be seen as just one movement.
Here are some of my thoughts on Modernism and Modernity:
The adjective modern refers to the contemporaneous. So in terms of art, all art is modern to those who make it, whether they are the inhabitants of Renaissance Florence or present day Lincoln. Specifically the term Modern refers to a historical period from the mid 19th century to the nineteen seventies. The exact end date for modernism is up for debate, but we could argue the the 1970s represented the beginning of the end.
Modernism is a critical approach that stresses innovation over all criteria. It is characterised by a radical attitude toward both the past and present. Historically we begin in the 18th Century and the Enlightenment and then at a period that has often been called the Age of Revolution (American, French and Industrial) and then in 1848 the year of the Chartists and the revolutions that swept Europe changing peoples attitude to contemporary life. Crucial to the development of modernism was the break down of traditional of financial power-the church, the state, and the aristocratic elite. This meant that artists were more independent and so free to determine the content of their art, refusing to depict paintings with mythological, religious and historical themes (often referred to as Academic Art). Modernism was widely, but not exclusively associated with life in an industrialised society and was often distinguished by its celebration of technology and science (challenged by many modern artists after 1914). Modern Art arose as part of Western society’s attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged from the 19th century. Modern design emerged as a reaction against the declining standards of craftsmanship and to the Art Nouveau movement from the 1880s onwards. Many practitioners recognized the need for new approaches that would enable the mass production of well-made artefacts for mass consumption. It was believed that mechanization and technology, if properly channelled, could change society for the better. Progress seems to be a key word here when in art we see one style succeed another in quick succession. In the late 19th Century and early Twentieth Century we see the content of art shift from realism and naturalism to spirituality, the celebration of technology, the evocation of primitivism and the emptying of art of all identifiable forms. So Modernism cannot be seen as just one movement.
Media Technologies and Public Spheres: 1
A representation of the public sphere imagined by Pablo Picasso in his collage Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912).
This entry is little late as the unit has almost been completed. So my comments here are based partly on past notes. This particular unit, 'Media Technologies and Public Sphere' deals with themes such as how media technologies play a central role in shaping the idea of 'public communication'.
It deals with role of newspapers, publications, oil paint, the camera, television, the telegraph, the World Wide Wide, the Internet and radio and there role in shaping public discourse. What is media's significance in liberal-democratic societies? How did the public sphere shape the development of liberal democracies in the west?
The public sphere although may be shaped my mediums discourse like the media technologies mentioned above, there are other 'mediums' that may not be too apparent: the coffee shop from the seventeenth century onwards that emerged sometime between the Commonwealth and the Restoration; the Salon in 18th Century, the pre-Revolutionary France, that emerged in Paris in opposition to court life in Versailles and the café of the nineteenth and twentieth, full of rootless cosmopolitans (that is I think how Stalin described them), revolutionaries and café intellectuals.
The last "medium of discourse" is represented above in a collage by Picasso.
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