1st. (inspirational) lecture @ New media and communication 2012

New Media and Communication Fall 2012
Welcome.

Wednesday, August 29, 12

Today

• Vanity slides about me

• The aim for this course: theory, method and research question

• What is new media (dry as dust but hang on!)

• Computing as new media

[Break]

• The Internet and networks as new media

• Inspiration for research question to come

• Reading plan and other practical stuﬀ

The low down...

• I work as an advisor and product strategist at the start-up A Close Shave

• Master of Science in IT, Digital Design and Communication, 2012 ITU
Thesis: “Civic culture and Anonymity - a study on Anonymous”

• TA in this course last year (Fall 2011)

• I ﬁnd interest in everything digital, mobile and social


In a days work I...

Do customer service
Social business, gamiﬁcation
and social media marketing
Act as community manager

Blog

Do strategic workshops with clients

Do social design

Plan the product and business strategy
for our social learning product

...and I do a lot of presentations (sort of like this one)


My aim for this course is...

• Introduction to the ﬁeld

• Theory, both practical and meta

• Methods, concrete tools for media and communication analysis

• Research question training

• A lot of exercises. I believe in practice and experience, not in reciting
theoretical work.


Theory - what’s that?

• “Media and Communication” is a broad field as it rarely works alone.
You usually need a supplementary theoretical focus to make your research
relevant, eg. sociology, psychology, business - you name it

• Theory is the “what” and “why” to the Research question

• A theory is just that, a theory - you should always question it!

• That’s why we will train in formulating research questions; to get a feeling of
the media and communication field and different theoretical approaches

• New media is new - new is a relative term - so let’s just call it media


Methods

• Methods are the “How” to the Research question
eg. Ethnography, interviews, observations, analysis, quantitative, qualitative

• This course is introductory and we will mostly discuss methods.
You will have plenty of time to do projects and actually work with methods
later on.

• Discuss theories, reﬂect deeply on methods.

• We will do exercises that introduce you to diﬀerent methods.


“All existing media are translated into numerical
data accessible for the computer.
The result: graphics, moving images, sounds,
shapes, spaces, and texts become computable,
that is, simply sets of computer data.
In short media, becomes new media.”

- Manovich


Numerical representation
Modularity
Automation
Variability
Transcoding


“The newness of new media makes it
particularly difﬁcult to write about, or at
least to say anything useful. Most writers
lapse into futurology, or remain mired in
ungrounded theory.”
- Manovich


Arthur C. Clarke “Predicting the Future” - BBC 1964
http://youtu.be/FxYgdX2PxyQ

Research is always deﬁned by a
Research question,
which always takes it standpoint in
certain methods
and certain theory


Above the wave
Utopians: New media changes everything.
Everything is new.
Technological hype...you know the type.

Us
Even if we can’t “take
pictures” of the wave,
we can still ride it.
Investigate it.
Research it.
You wanna be this guy!

Below the wave
Dystopians: critical about all things new, says
everything is the same, bussiness as usual and so
on.


This is your research question.


What is “new media” to you?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m4KZHDVWRE


“today we are in the middle of a
new media revolution -- the shift of
all culture to computer- mediated
forms of production, distribution,
and communication.”
-Manovich


Distribution

Production Consumption


1613: ﬁrst use of the word “Computer”


“A computer is a general purpose device
that can be programmed to carry out a
ﬁnite set of arithmetic or logical
operations.
Since a sequence of operations can be
readily changed, the computer can solve
more than one kind of problem.”
- Wikipedia


She programmed for this:
Worlds ﬁrst programmer: The “Analytical Engine” (1837)
Ada Lovelace, 1815-1852 by Charles Babbage


Allan Turing (1912-1954) Artiﬁcial representation of
The father of modern the Turing Machine -
computer science and AI. This thing was never built


Content = Information


“Communication is the
exchange of thoughts,
messages, or information,
as by speech, visuals,
signals, writing, or behavior.”
- Wikipedia


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRpcSjck4wo


Networks


But how are the networks
affecting culture and society?


Commerce is changing


“MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS”

EVALUATE

BOND

CONSIDER BUY

ADVOCACY EXPERIENCE


“If you look five years out,
every industry is going to
be rethought in a social
way. You can remake
whole industries.
That’s the big thing.”
- Marc Zuckerberg
CEO & Founder af Facebook
til TIME Magazine, Dec 2010


Journalism is changing


Politics are changing


Organizations are changing


Took approx 100 mio hours to make


The same number of hours Americans
spend watching TV in a weekend.


“One thing that makes the current age
remarkable is that we can now treat free time
as a general social asset that can be
harnessed for large, communally created
projects, rather than as a set of individual
minutes to be whiled away one person at a
time.”
- Clay Shirky


Citizenship is changing


Economics are changing


“The world is becoming
too fast, too complex and
too networked for one
company to have all the
answers inside.”
Yochai Benkler


We will be covering much of this in class.
But ﬁrst we need to understand research.


Media

Technology Society


The plan and contents of this course
An overview of what we will be working with each time.
And why it is relevant to you.


1st. (inspirational) lecture @ New media and communication 2012

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