Community Media - Interactive World

Time to Bury Public Services? The Big Theme in the 80s and 90s was privatization of industries which had been taken into public ownership, or which had evolved as ‘public services.’ The task was achieved without much political difficulty because many industries which it was assumed retained a strategic significance such as manufacturing, coal, and steel were making a loss and were now perceived to be a burden on the hard-pressed state. In other cases industries such as oil, gas, telecoms, electricity and water had evolved to make a safe profit and had become highly valued assets that could easily be (un)bundled for sale. The Post Office (once attached to Telecoms) is the last vestige of the entrepreneurial state, where a commercial public service is retained for the common good, is perhaps the final remainder of a commercial service in public hands. There was a sense that state ownership and asset sales had reached the end of the line. No politician would dare to touch social care...

Light and Shadow: What will happen to books and reading in the Age of Kindle? I had the opportunity to make use of a friend’s Kindle a fortnight ago. Dear Reader, you may be shocked at my tardiness in coming to the most fashionable gadget in recent years. Indeed, in 2010, I fought off several offers of Kindle Christmas presents from the many friends and family who know very well my addiction to reading books. I was aware of the vast library of free books and that was a temptation: having them in my pocket, rather than stuck on the hard drive, or only available with internet access. What struck me was the sleek design of the Kindle, its comfortable lightness and ease of use; but most impressive its screen technology, unglaring and flicker-free. As my large Victorian terrace house will not accommodate more purchases of books it makes sense to switch at least some of my purchases to electronic copies for certain kinds of work. But I still have reservation and feel that the potential f...

Radicals, Revolutionaries and the New Cinema: Selected Quotations designed to provoke discussion of new technology, collaboration, remixing, machine assembly, participatory cinema and media interactivity: “The film drama is the Opium of the people…down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!” (Dziga Vertov) “The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby … false! […] To DOGME 95, cinema is not individual! Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema.” (Lars von Trier and Vinterberg, 1995) “Kino-Eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact, of film documents as opposed to the exchange of cinematic theatrical representations.” Dz...

Cristian Collini    Common and recurring rhetorical strategies for opposing Web 2.0 and proposing a model of cultural decline are the subject of this blog.    At each stage I have attempted briefly and tentatively to outline alternative approaches. Please comment at the end, if you have time: your views are valued. Common strategies used to attack the proponents of social media collaboration are: (1) attack the most outrageous and unrepresentative claims for new digital media. Thus Jaron Lanier’s brilliant but sour book You are not a Gadget pours over an attack on the Singularity, the global virtual brain, the noosphere, and the nonsense peddled by Ray Kurzweil. Science fiction is a healthy entertainment but when it’s married to conspiracy theory on a grand scale the appropriate response is mirth and indifference, not a fist fight with imaginary monsters. But it’s worth admitting, absurdly, that Kurzweil’s global alien fantasy almost approximat...

Collaboration, Art, and the Discourses of Participatory Film The discussion of collaborative approaches to making films has moved into prime position during the last year. It’s a very healthy situation for community-led film makers and bodes well for the future role of digital arts and participatory democracy. At last we have some worthy examples of theory, technology and practice working together in a creative fashion. The BBC has recently featured a news item on an innovative collaborative film project to be called My Streets. The project has major establishment backers, and is perhaps another example of popular participation filtered through selective curators. The patchwork is a familiar model for the community portrait. Recurring themes will perhaps oscillate with chance collisions in the manner of collage. We can celebrate the flickering poetry of surprise in the global 24 hour project Life in a Day which saw thousands of collaborators generate a feature length film cura...