So today we had a seminar by Katharine Willis on digital technologies, representations and mediaspaces. Digital technologies are not something I come across in my personal research, and are something I would not have even considered impacting my thesis until today. Thats not to say I'm completely rethinking what I am doing, but the seminar wasn't what I had expected in terms of what it covered. Social media and other modern forms of communicating and interpreting are things which hugely affect our identity and sense of place, and Katharine put forward some really interesting ideas about the current situation.
To be completely honest, I am struggling to remember every area of the subject she covered, but I will just talk about the areas I found most interesting. Firstly, the way we experience space.
With the development of technology, it is quite certain that we experience space, and place, in a completely different way to those born before 1985. The internet was a fundamental part of growing up in the 90's, and today social media such as Facebook and twitter take up huge chunks of peoples lives, particularly in the teenage years. But is the production of mediaspace a positive or negative for man's need to dwell and belong?
I'm going to write what I feel about these issue at the moment, then use the coming week to read a few of the texts given to us by Katharine, then look back on my thoughts and whether they have changed.
For me, I think that in the current cyber-social generation, we are starting to shift from an active participation in 'life' to the need to validate oneself through social media...and i do believe it is a negative force...today we feel the need to 'update our status' to what we are doing or feeling at the moment, to become spectated upon, only to gain a social status within a custom circle of 'friends'. Perhaps this is a good thing, so that we have an outlet for our emotions, and so we become more social and connected to the people within our social spheres, but I cant help but think why does anyone feel the need to 'post' that they are about to take a bath, or use the toilet?!
The internet and social media are funny things, you can be someone you are not online, you could make yourself the most social online user ever, reply to all friend requests with 'accept', write on all of your friends' walls regularly in order to hear the days gossip, 'attend' every event you have been invited to and hey, why not create your own event...but that's not to say you are not a 48 year old catholic extremist with a mission to convert or kill!! (I have no idea where that example came from, I'm sorry...) I'm going to use a slide that was in our lecture today, so gods of originality forgive me...
At my last job as an Activity Leader at EF Bournemouth, I was advised to make myself another profile, as many of the young students at the english school would add on Facebook...I complied and made myself another page, and within a month had almost 200 friends...but it felt odd, and it made me think about something...am I really what is to be seen online? If you go onto my Facebook profile and look at my info, then do you get a picture of who I am as a person? What my taste, personality and behavior is like?? I obviously have control over what is on my page, but the fact that....I don't know....I haven't illustrated that I am a racist (I'm definitely not by the way......honestly.....no, honestly...) is slightly skewing who I am, or how I am perceived to be to others...but whats the harm.......
In this current climate of updates, statuses, profiles and tweets, we look to the social networking sites to validate ourselves and our actions. If we have a good night out we feel the need to make a comment on it, then the following day make another comment before uploading the pictures and commenting on them. I went traveling and lived in Peru for a few months, however I have been asked numerous times if I even went, where I went, and why haven't I put the photos up on Facebook yet...and the simple reason is I don't feel the need to do it! If someone wants to know how it was then I'd be more than happy to give them the story and show them the pictures! This may be the anti-social side of me, and it may look like I'm all high and mighty on my gallant white steed of 'fuck-the-system-I'm-different,' but I'm really not..In fact I'm a massive hypocrite, as I am currently writing a blog to be released into the global realm of social media...and I'll probably 'share' the link with my friends on my profile...I've even just put pictures of this weekend up to share with my friends... There has to be negative connotations attached to the availability of this personal information we provide about ourselves...recently there has been a growth in the amount of people even 'checking in'...telling everyone where they are and who they are with...WHY!? Again i think it comes down to self validating oneself in an ever growing social world. However, it cannot be denied that we are becoming more and more creatures of social interactions. These sites allow for social interactions with friends from afar en mass. We can connect with peoples from all sides of the globe and share experiences, teachings and ideas on a daily basis, and I'm sure there are huge numbers of direct and indirect positives coming from this ability.
I've completely gone off on a tangent, so time to get back on track...space....space in some respects is still seen in an 'old-fashioned' Cartesian sense as a contained void with strictly geometrical limits and boundaries, but the emphasis is changing to a paradigm where representations of space are created which affect the way the space is perceived. We can 'google' a location and look at pictures, and even walk down through the street and look at the buildings al around, creating a cyber-physical meshed space in the viewers mind. I also think chartroom is a funny word...it's as if when you go 'into' the chartroom,, you are in a different spatial setting, you have just created a boundary around yourself which can only be permeated by 'leaving' the 'chartroom.'
Katharine Willis also brought up the situation of the phone call on the train which I have never thought about until now. If there are two or more passengers on a train conducting a very loud conversation about what the are going to eat tonight then we tend to be a little annoyed, but not enough to engage in a conflict, but replace the other person with a telephone and we have a problem. People around get substantially more annoyed with this then with the social interaction of two or more people, and the only reason is that we can only hear half the conversation. We are being excluded from their social space as we cannot hear what the other has to say and this exclusion infuriates us.
I'm going to leave this post as it is for the moment. My mind is starting to blank, so I will spend tomorrow reading and researching this topic and report back before heading off to work (why did I tell you that...was it to validate myself.....).
