AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS April 2017 Kerala State Institute of Design, Kollam
Shiraz Iqbal + Suvani Suri Supported by Deepak Mallya
I. CONCEPT
[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
Designing a workshop for design students on the theory, forms and practice of New Media presents a unique set of challenges. The first being of course, curatorial. How does one go about curating relevant material to acquaint the uninitiated with the subject? The workshop duration presented itself as the second challenge. Spanning merely three days, this was to be a sprint session in the philosophy of technology for the students of communication design. Given the oceanic expanse and depth of the subject, we were faced with an obvious paucity of in-workshop time. Additionally, since the students were expected to begin work on their final design projects immediately following the workshop, our time with them had an added significance. Thus, enabling a critical outlook towards the subject was our obvious third challenge. How could we design the workshop to generate a collective spirit of confident critical thought? As a corollary, the task at hand necessitated that we as facilitators re-orient ourselves within the realm of technology and new media studies prior to the sessions. Our sessions had to be responsive, up-to-date and snappy. We did not just want to rehash theoretical perspectives on New Media from the classical readers and collections that we had been exposed to in college as we did not think this would meet the objective at hand. As we saw it, our task was to inspire the learners to set off on personal journeys within the media space seeking out new perspectives in a spirit of deep, philosophical inquiry. We decided to begin in the same manner as our first stint at cotutoring together. This meant setting off from the basic understanding that our “goal was not the delivery of some absolute body of knowledge, but rather to invent possibilities for action out of a fuller perception of the world around us�[See footnote 1]. Only the focus in this case would be the world of media technologies in which the contemporary individual finds themselves always already submerged, whether or not she is aware of it.
1 | Concept
[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
I. CONCEPT A few weeks prior to the sessions, we had set out on our own recce of the fields surrounding media and technology, beginning in ways that were personal to each of us. What are the narratives that we are familiar with, and how through these could we unpack the other lesser known ones? We read, watched, spoke and wrote, often stumbling upon surprising finds that we earmarked as we followed the course of our inquiries. We kept time aside to revisit the essential new media readers, poring over the texts that we had been prescribed during our own course of study at design school. We had to absorb the - often dense and unwieldy - concepts they examined anew, discussing their applications in the now so that we could sneak them into organic classroom discussions, unpacking them in the form of stories, encountered, shared and imagined. During this period, we came to see the immense value in gathering, reading and engaging in collective dialogue with an extended community of practitioners. Several rounds of discussions were had, examining the essence of technology and its relationship with human existence. Each unique perspective on the subject took us deeper and deeper. Every conversation was a treasure trove of insights. In the process we found ourselves stepping back and asking the most fundamental and preliminary questions, stripped of all assumptions and prior positions. This was a perspective we wanted to take with ourselves into the classroom, given the daunting latitude of the subject.
Assessing the classroom situation - the existent understanding and inclinations of the learners and moulding the framework and conversations as we went would be crucial to the success of the workshop. With a little help from friends, our tutors and guides (Jignesh Khakhar and Anand Sukumaran) we gathered the material and set a day-wise framework in place, keeping in mind that this was merely a skeleton to guide us and by no means binding. Once again, borrowing from our previous experience of learning as a community, we wanted to ensure that we begin in a way that set the tone for a more personal inquiry for each of them, easing each one into a space of reflection and sharing. Given the small number of participants this time (four students of communication design although we had a few who joined us from other disciplines and stayed on, bringing flavour and diversity to the sessions), there was potential for the sessions to be more intimate, conversational and attuned to each of their concerns. We anticipated that the students would be bringing to the table their own unique interests, motivations, experiences and expectations as far as technology and media was concerned and wanted this to be the common reservoir of shared understanding that we led into a deeper collective inquiry. Our in-workshop discussions, therefore needed to revolve around the nodes at which the learners were currently positioned. In order to make these visible, our first task as facilitators
[Footnote 1] What we learnt from time travelling together-Part II, Shiraz Iqbal https://shiraziqbal.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/what-we-learnt-from-time-travelling-together-part-2/ 2 | Concept
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I. CONCEPT was to create a space where they could express their opinions, fears, reservations and desires regarding technology and its potential in the world. Our strategy was to use the icebreaker session creatively, using each of their prior projects, backgrounds and interests to open up pathways into the larger subject discussion on Day One. This would allow us take them through the different views of the media space, swooping in at times and zooming out at others, gliding
3 | Concept
through the familiar suddenly into alternative and critical terrains. Through our discussion, we wanted to demonstrate that the personal could be a very effective entry point into conceptual investigation within the media space. And it was thus that we began our sessions as eager and excited as our learners, to see what discoveries we could make together.
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Day One
II. METHOD
Getting Comfortable
We began with asking the students to introduce the physical computing projects they had worked on in the first leg of the course (they had already had a session on coding responsive circuits using the Arduino platform in the previous semester), as well as their previous academic/work experience and favourite projects. As each student spoke, we mapped a unique word cloud on a chart paper laid out in front of them, indicating their own very personal connection with, and possible motivations behind exploring technology and design. Once each student had their own unique interests mapped and laid out on the table, we moved to a collaborative word cloud on the whiteboard centered around the word ‘technology’. As our free-form discussion continued, linked concepts emerged organically in the foreground. The intent was to reveal technology as a base for our lives - a field of relations - in the absence of which, very few of the things we are used to today would be possible. While this may appear to be a mundane, everyday fact, unearthing these very complex relations was itself the work we hoped we would be able to do together on day one. The following section presents a sample of the rich discussion that ensued. It should also serve to elaborate why we feel this kind of discussion is important.
Revealing Technology as a Field of Relations
There is a funny phenomenon at work in the world today. Take away a person’s smartphone and they will suddenly find themselves helpless, bored, irritable. And this same person will replace the very same phone with another, more ‘advanced’ one in just a few months. You can count on it. And of course, we all have to buy new laptops at least once every 2 -3 years. That’s just what the ‘life’ of a device is these days. Even if yours is still running in a couple of years time, chances are the software you’ll need to run will just not load on your antiquated hardware. While this was hardly the case 10, 20 years ago, it is the new normal. We use more and more digital services with every passing day - just think about the government’s push for digital transactions following their strategic move to demonetize critical currency denominations a few months ago. PayTM has found a permanent place in all of our wallets. We can all
4 | Method | Day One
[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
II. METHOD: day one observe how our friends and family find it to be the greatest inconvenience to step out onto the road and hail an autorickshaw - a behaviour that was common less than 5 years ago. Uber has changed all that: it is a middle class reflex to use Uber if one needs to travel within the city. Think of Swiggy, FoodPanda and a zillion other food delivery apps. Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra. The list goes on and on. Can you imagine going on a holiday without Expedia, Yatra, MakeMyTrip, AirBnB? The easier it gets to consume, the more we consume. For every inconvenience
5 | Method | Day One
or problem we might have, there is a digitized solution just waiting to be launched. And a million startups waiting in line to launch it just at the ‘right’ time, when the market is ‘ready’! And then on a personal level, we are constantly generating data that we want to store, kind of like we have always done. Except, back in the day you would store it in journals, on personal hard drives, cassette tapes or floppy disks. Each disk was yours to write and keep. And this brings us to that newest fundamental
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II. METHOD: day one household/on-the-go utility: the internet. No internet data pack will ever be enough. Have you noticed that we are sending and demanding larger and larger files from each other as a matter of daily routine? Streaming one HD movie on Netflix uses 3GB of data. And yet once you’ve watched movies in HD, there’s no going back. Dhoni appears on TV to tell ‘uncle’ that without HD channels, his TV is just a dabba. From communication, we have slowly but steadily made the shift towards consumption. What are our choices when our data ‘consumption’ habits become so compulsive that the kind of storage we can afford to buy and keep is outstripped on an almost monthly basis? Two words: Trust Google. These days we have no choice but to use data to store data, which means we also pay for data to read our own data. Companies and entrepreneurs would be crippled without google docs and cloud computing. Too many things depend on staying connected - to “the cloud”. How many of us think of the cloud as more than just an abstraction, a convenient, always-there interface? Behind all this computing, storage and retrieval power are massive, heavily guarded server farms - rows of bunker-like warehouses. They form the material basis of the data economy. This is what we are paying for when we buy data: millions of physical servers that are always on. Everything depends on this. If data is declared a human right (Malayalis have declared internet access a basic human right following Costa Rica, Finland and others), it can only be so because people have come to depend on connectivity (the use and abuse of data) so much so that life becomes impoverished, stunted, dishearteningly difficult without it. It is the same with the abuse of any resource: water, coal, metals. “The first thing I remember about the internet was the noise” wrote an internet critic once (12). These days we remember the internet only by its absence. That unbearable solitude when it breaks down. Or the stillness when it is working so well, the kind that makes it disappear and everything that we want magically appears. Nostalgia for the good old days is all very well and good, but technology is an undeniably fundamental aspect of how we order our world today - of how our financial markets operate, how our systems of travel are organized. And with smart cities, the advent of AI built on neural networks, self driving
6 | Method | Day One
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II. METHOD: day one cars and automated bots capable of higher and higher level tasks each year, this fundamental infrastructure that our lives have become so dependent on, also threatens to overwhelm and engulf our lives and our humanity. Look at the data on drone strikes - with more refined remote piloting, targeting and impact estimation capabilities, the collateral damage that national armies are willing to risk is going through the roof. Also these smart devices that we carry around with us all the time are now part of the omniscient surveillance networks that log our each and every move. Your smartphone is basically a glorified tracking device beaming out your location, and recording your every interaction in a form that can easily be exploited by powerful vested interests. Big data (which powers smart cities) is nothing but the informed use of billions of terabytes of data recording your every possible behaviour pattern, which can be fed back into the system to influence your very behaviours. Look at Cambridge Analytica’s role in shaping the outcome around Brexit and the Trump victory (5). Look at how strategically our Prime Minister uses social media on a daily basis.
Concluding Day One: Productive Confusion
While this is a snapshot in time of things as they stand at this particular moment, there is limitless possibility for a far ranging, freeflowing and rich discussion of this sort around technology at any point in time. What this enables students to see is how a digital project or
7 | Method | Day One
product never exists in a vacuum, but is always inextricably linked with social and private life, supply chains and politics. Mapping out this embeddedness serves as an introduction to beginning to think conceptually, contextually and critically about the relationship between human beings and their technology. When beginning to engage with technology today, this is the kind of understanding that we must begin from for it is undeniable that technology has everything to do with New Media. Precisely what that is, is what we proceeded to investigate on the second day. As an enjoyable wrap-up exercise for Day One we screened the movie Eye-in-the-Sky, which is an accessible contemporary film that reveals some of the technological complexities at the heart of modern warfare, including the use of drones and surveillance, decentralized, collaborative, remote decision making, algorithmic risk analysis and the all important human element at the heart of the elaborate modern war machine. Needless to say, the students ended day one with their heads spinning, overwhelmed, searching for a method to all this madness, a safe anchor from where to begin thinking about their own projects. From experience, we feel that such a controlled period of confusion is essential to the learning process, and so this is where we preferred to leave them at the end of Day One.
[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
Day Two
II. METHOD
What is New Media?
Everyone begins their tryst with New Media with the same question. “But...what is New Media?” We all suspect (expect?) that technology has quite a lot to do with it, but that is about the extent of our certainty. This is a very curious phenomenon to be experiencing in the internet age, when information about anything under the sun is a tap/ swipe/ click away. As the world gets more luminous, New Media seems to remain as stubbornly nebulous as ever. And its main theorists - philosophers of technology, cryptic professors of language - seem to take a special interest in spectacularly obtuse turns of phrase. (see Marshall Mcluhan, Martin Heidegger etc.) What is it about New Media that makes it so difficult to pin down? And as practitioners, is there a way to turn this knowledge to our advantage? While an established medium like film has had time on its side, allowing the foundations of film theory to slowly grow in strength, the peculiar problem of New Media lies in its very definition. Because New Media has to always contend with ‘newness’, the literal answer to our first question - “what is New Media” - is always shifting. New Media today is old tomorrow. This brings us to the fundamental problem of New Media: the problem of shifting literacy. Lisa Gitelman (Prof. of Media and English at NYU) has a useful analogy to help us think about this (14): “one helpful way to think of media may be as the scientific instruments of a society at large… If one scientist or a group of scientists invents a new instrument, they must demonstrate persuasively that the instrument does or means what they say, that it represents the kind and order of phenomena they intend. Other scientists start using the instrument, and ideally, its general acceptance soon helps to make it a transparent fact of scientific practice … Science and media become [everyday tools] when scientists and society at large forget many of the norms and standards they are heeding, and then forget that they are heeding norms and standards at all. Yet … [as] much as people may converse through a telephone and forget the telephone itself, the context of telephoning makes all kinds of difference to the things they say and the way they say them.”
8 | Method | Day Two
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II. METHOD: day two And so the basic challenge before New Media practitioners is to remain ahead of the curve when it comes to the use of, and experimentation with the newest means of communication and expression as they are invented, embedded and dispersed in society.
Understanding New Media as a Field of Practice
We had asked the students to look up two art + design projects each, that they felt were examples of “New Media”. They brought videos, images and text they had found and turned around the question to ask - “Is this New Media?” This is a deceptively easy way to begin speaking about the design of an experience. Each project was treated as an experience that we unpacked as a class, looking for signs of im-media-cy, or in layman’s terms, what makes an experience ‘magical’? What is it about an experience that creates that suspended instant of childlike wonder - when you want to shake a device, to look under, over or behind something to find those ‘strings’? What makes you gesticulate and grasp at thin air, become obsessed with new and rarely used gestures? As you can see, this is a fascinating root concept to engage with in an open discussion, as it allows us to branch off and discuss all forms of New Media theory. From ‘immediacy’, it is a short step away to speaking about creating such experiences that foreground/reveal/show/un-hide phenomena and things that are hidden in the world around us. We found it was useful to begin this section with a project or two that involve New Media
9 | Method | Day Two
practitioners acting in transformative ways on whatever phenomena we ended Day One with. In this particular case, we took the instance of drone warfare and Josh Begley’s graduate thesis project which culminated in ‘dronestre.am’. What bothered Begley was the invisible nature of such warfare and his entire effort was directed at making data on these strikes available to a larger community of artists who could then use it to build visualizations and applications to bring this ‘invisible’ phenomenon to the notice of a wider audience. (51) As we hopped from project to project, we made sure (following our discussion on Day One) that we touched on mediated interventions in every aspect of contemporary life. For instance we took the case of the introduction of ‘Hawkeye’ across a range of sports that has completely changed the nature of decision making and even influenced strategy across sports like tennis, cricket and football. - A technology that allows an almost instantaneous path simulation continuing the projectile motion of a ball whose motion has been blocked. (The commentary of James Bridle was very helpful in this particular case) (52) Interspersing such real world examples (that we tend to forget did at one point constitute “a new media experience”) with projects like Begley’s which are arguably at the periphery of everyday life - allows the students to slowly realize the potentiality of acting with an informed understanding of media. Through this discussion, they are able to understand hopefully, why it is important as a New Media practitioner to always be pushing the
[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
II. METHOD: day two limits of expression with both existing as well as experimental new forms, and re-purposed older media. As each case was tied back in with the phenomena we discussed on Day One, we were also able to impress upon the students’ minds the significance of ‘context’ - that while our mainstream media discourse likes to spread about the idea of Technology (capital T) as an immaculate saving grace, how important it is that we, as New Media practitioners, critically uncover the forms in which technologies are
used as an exercise in power and politics; how important it is to understand what effects the technologies that we (New Media Designers) appropriate as our medium - much as a painter uses paint as a medium - have on the psyche of the user. Otherwise we risk being outsmarted by the very objects we seek to express ourselves with. This is the crucial problem of shifting literacies in the age of New Media as fantastic new technologies are thrust into everyday life at faster and faster rates.
10 | Method | Day Two
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II. METHOD: day two Concluding Day Two: Beginning Informed Interventions
Now that the students had been motivated -about the possibility and potential for action (and warned) about the possible pitfalls of working with emerging technologies - we set the students the task of re-assessing their chosen areas of intervention (from the earlier, physical computing segment of the course). This meant taking time to go back and work on in-depth research to create conceptual maps that examined the relationships of their core ‘interest area’ with everyday life, technologies and other fundamental related concepts. As facilitators - because of the highly compressed time span - we began this session with one-to-one discussions where we helped each student isolate their particular core interest area (it was helpful to return to the maps we had begun with each student on Day One and unpack those to kick this section off). Once the students came back with their research, we had a group session, where together as a class we appreciated and critiqued the findings of each student. The conceptual maps the students had created allowed them to get a stronger base understanding of how an ‘interest area’ can be developed into a concept. We ended the day with a ‘homework’ assignment: each student was asked to dig up at least 10 instances of projects that had already been worked on by other practitioners, within their particular interest area - a quick precedent study. Thus the process for Day Two was to move from the total immersion of Day One towards unpacking how New Media works as a responsive practice. This was followed by an informed reevaluation and re-isolation of each student’s interest areas (which they had started the course with) into its simplest core constituents. Together, we built these up into conceptual blocks that could laid the ground for in-depth precedent studies. We left the students at the end of Day Two with basic guidelines to do intensive research for precedents, and its relevance to locating one’s own unique response. We would start Day Three with a discussion of these, intending to guide the students towards further research if needed, followed by ideation and prototyping.
11 | Method | Day Two
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Day Three
II. METHOD
Fluidity in Research Methodology
On Day Three it was crucial that we continue the process of consolidation we had begun on Day Two, helping the students to move fluidly from overlapping interest areas towards more focused and refined concepts. While there are set processes that one can use when carrying out conceptual research it is important that the students not get overly comfortable with any fixed set of prescriptive methodologies. We have already stressed how the overly fluid nature of New Media as a design field requires one to remain adaptive and open.
Systematically Engaging with Design Problems in the World
We encouraged each student to begin by locating a series of projects and concerns (news clippings, interesting websites) they find themselves drawn to (divergence). This is the point when it is okay for the student to (once again) feel lost in a sea of information, marking the phase of constructive uncertainty.
12 | Method | Day Three
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II. METHOD: day three A group discussion and mapping exercise, layered over the sea of information they had collated, helped the student identify significant interest areas and recurring questions or concepts with very deep personal connections (convergence). They were then asked to confidently cast their research net wide within the identified interest area to map out all the possibilities open to them (divergence).
13 | Method | Day Three
Once this was done, a return to the mapping and discussion board helped to identify certain specific themes - now with well-refined contexts - that had begun to emerge (convergence). While this is where we had ended Day Two, in the early part of the discussion on Day Three it was important that we reflexively go over how we had methodically proceeded towards clarity in our research.
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II. METHOD: day three This is an important aspect to keep in mind, we felt, because of the prevailing mental orientation towards research and research methods within education today [see footnote 2]. Delving into these themes that they have each converged upon, the students were encouraged to again diverge - to unearth a range of possible sub themes. This was followed by a (by now predictable) move towards convergence by testing hypotheses of interest (which had emerged from the research) through prototyping and testing. The students were guided on successive rounds of research and discussion to broaden or narrow the focus, as befit the needs of each as well as the available time.
Concluding Day Three: Carrying Workshop Learnings Forward in Practice and Industry
This is how practitioners can move systematically from larger themes to narrower threads. It is important to remain sympathetic to the confusion the students may experience when working this way for the first time. We cannot stress how important it is to reflect out loud on the decisions we as facilitators make when guiding them at each step of their research. Group discussion, co-synthesis and informed decision making regarding each successive round of research are key elements in the success of the overall undertaking.
Indeed, engaging in these practices reflexively with a community is critical for preventing frustration while working on projects. This must be impressed upon the students, so that they begin using their most valuable learning resources - each other - to the full at the earliest. Since there is always the unsettling question of how all this helps one to earn a living in the industry following graduation, we found it helpful to bring in a User Experience Design veteran to reinforce how (1) learning to improvise, (2) staying agile during research and testing and (3) remaining ever open to new learning, are the three most important abilities a New Media Design practitioner can and must cultivate. In the process, the students were able to ask their own burning questions and seek clarification on points such as: how does the product industry differ from the services one, is it better to begin in consulting or within a product/ service company, and how do I put together a portfolio that is hire-worthy? When planning and facilitating such workshops, our overall goal as practitioner-facilitators must be to imbue the students with the sense of confidence they will need to deal with an area of specialization that by its very nature demands daily confrontations with doubt, ambiguity and uncharted exploration.
[Footnote 2] What we learnt from time travelling together-Part II, Shiraz Iqbal https://shiraziqbal.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/what-we-learnt-from-time-travelling-together-part-2/ 14 | Method | Day Three
III. CONCLUSION
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— by Deepak Mallya “Tell me and I will forget. Teach me and I will remember. Involve me and I will learn” - Benjamin Franklin Just as how a good writer grips the reader with intelligently crafted prose, a teacher intrigues her students by sparking their imagination and challenging their thinking. It takes immense research, creativity and care to accurately communicate complex concepts, engage participants and help them internalise these concepts. With that in mind the daunting task set for this short course was to understand, discuss, and learn about the various facets of the complex, often abstruse idea of New Media. Given the affordances of the course and the enormous scope it needed to cover, it was wonderful see its framework develop; Not only blending critical discourse and experiential learning through expositions of different case studies, examples and the student work, but most importantly by constantly adjusting and delivering the content on the terms of the learners. The expressive space created by the tutors, that fostered debate, confusion and the free exchange of opinions reminded me of the social pedagogue Tom Senninger’s Learning Zone Model (25), represented by 3 concentric circles: The innermost circle is the Safe/Comfort Zone which is formed by our immediate surroundings in which we feel the most at home, where no risks need to be taken. The second circle represents this Learning/stretch Zone, where one is challenged to venture further out of the comfort zone, which encourages curiosity and experimentation. Finally, the last circle represents the Panic Zone, where one is driven by a sense of fear and learning and internalisation cannot happen. The concept is interesting, because once challenged to step out of the comfort zone and into the Learning zone, there is no coming back to the same comfort zone. Instead, returning to the comfort zone helps in reflection and in understanding change. Its like coming back to a city you once visited a long time ago. The sights and the people might seem familiar, but the city and you have developed and grown. You now have the
15 | Conclusion
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III. CONCLUSION opportunity to see how things have changed and assess whether it is for the good or the bad or otherwise. Like Heraclitus says, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The students, I’m sure, experienced the same feelings, as they transitioned between the comfort zone and the learning zone through the nature of the activities performed (especially looking back at their previous work). The constant cycling between observation, deconstruction and reflection, led to the revelation of deeper meaning and brought different and otherwise unnoticeable aspects of new media and technology to the fore. Evidenced by the excerpt of the discussion from day one, it becomes apparent that The Invisible Web that weaves society, technology, politics, and many other fields together has been unearthed, which leads to the productive confusion. My own thoughts on reading the discussion are as follows: 1. To satisfy our insatiable need for instant gratification, our dependencies on our electronic devices grow. Yet the lives of the devices themselves are short lived, often relegated to our personal museums. 2. Convenience is king. But at what cost? To what end will we go to make our lives more convenient? Are we willing to compromise ourselves for the sake of convenience? 3. Through the omnipresent internet on our
smart devices, the more data we produce the better the technology appears to get, and the more we can further consume. The Prosumer is poised to be a self serving entity; with the development of Artificial Intelligence, the system becomes self correcting as well, infinitely producing, improving, consuming. Like the Ouroboros, the beginning and end would become indistinguishable. What, then, would it be like when the difference between human and algorithm vanish? 4. The influence and impact of the data we produce cannot go unnoticed. Data can change the course of elections, our lifestyles and behaviours. Numbers themselves don’t lie, but in the hands of the appropriate interpreter, numbers can create any fact, and bend truth itself. It is no wonder Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016 was Post-Truth. In these times when one’s information diet is supplied by news that’s even more finely targeted to one’s political ideology than ever before, how does one question its authenticity? Is there any room left to make up one’s own mind through independent thought or are we always going to be “the Target Audience”? However, convoluted though the previous thoughts may seem, there is just as much beauty in the progress we have made. With the propagation of the internet and the democratisation of technology, never has such a large part of the human race collectively participated in the creation, gathering and assimilation of data about ourselves or our existence. The largest act of society as a society!
16 | Conclusion
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IV. EPILOGUE
— by Deepak Mallya I will not attempt to explain New Media here. But instead discuss what interested me the most out of Day 2. The following excerpt from the text caught my attention: “And so the basic challenge before New Media practitioners is to remain ahead of the curve when it comes to the use of, and experimentation with the newest means of communication and expression as they are invented, embedded and dispersed in society...” What constitutes the newest means of communication? And what makes one medium old as another is introduced as new? I began thinking about the concept of obsolescence which essentially creates the curve the new media practitioners have to stay ahead of. Obsolescence is indeed governed by scientific discovery and progress as mentioned in the text, but being a field of relations, one cannot discount the strong economic and political factors that govern its existence. Media can slide down the curve on the whims of the market’s ability to sell. That which doesn’t sell is easily termed as obsolete and old; however technologically sound it is. Best example is the VHS and Betamax war. Where Betamax, even though being the superior technology and quality, fell into obscurity very quickly purely based on bad market strategy and VHS being able to hold 2 hours of data (a whole movie) as compared to only 1 hour on Betamax. It then becomes the responsibility of the new media practitioner (as touched upon on day two) to not only remain ahead of the curve in terms of use and experimentation with the newest technology but to be cognizant of the socio-political factors governing the tech which deem it to be placed into obsolescence. As a New Media Practitioner, one must critique the very forces that bring new media into light. As Paula Antonelli says in Design and the Elastic mind “Designers are those that stand between revolution and everyday life” New Media should not only be termed new as and when it has been invented and marketed but also how innovatively it can be reused, thereby retaining its value or even finding unconventional value in it. A part of remediation
17 | Epilogue
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IV. EPILOGUE after all is repurposing.(4) A notable example is Yuri Suzuki’s Sound-chaser project.(11) Where pieces of old records, were neatly carved, split and arranged to create a race track. The cars designed to run on the record race track were fitted with record player heads, that would pick up the music from the tracks as the cars glided over them. New and interesting soundscapes emerged through in the mix; a new play on the word “sound-track”. As practitioners of New Media, we embrace ambiguity and seek out answers to complex questions in any domain of interest. For this, it is of utmost importance to involve oneself by reading and assimilating the work of specialists in a variety of fields and to talk to people and learn from their personal experiences. At the same time we must apply our learning through iterative prototyping with different media this not only helps with internalising our learning, but also helps in the articulation of the insight we have gained through our studies. Through this The Invisible Web unravels itself before us, and through this we are able to design better solutions and narrate more meaningful stories.
18 | Epilogue
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1. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Navayana, 2012. 2. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations (1979): 211-244 3. Berardi, Franco. After the future. AK Press, 2011. 4. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2000. (p45-49) 4. Boyd, Danah. “White flight in networked publics?.” How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with Myspace and Facebook.” Race after the Internet. Ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White. vols: Routledge (2013): 203-22. 5. Bridle, James. “The New Aesthetic and its Politics.” BookTwo.org (12/06/2013) 6. Cadwalladr, Carole. “Robert Mercer, the Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media” The Guardian (26/02/2017) 7. Cadwalladr, Carole. “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked” The Guardian (07/05/2017) 8. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso Books, 2013. 9. Darling, Kate. “If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots” The New Yorker (28/11/2016). 10. Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT Press, 2013. 11. Etherington, Rose. Sound Chaser by Yuri Suzuki. Dezeen. (31/07/2008 ) 12. Feenberg, Andrew, and Alastair Hannay. “Preface.” Technology and the Politics of Knowledge (1995). 13. Fessler, Leah. “We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment”. Quartz. (22/02/2017) 14. Gitelman, Lisa. “Always already new. Media, history, and the data of culture”, MIT Press (2006). 15. Haddow, Douglas. “DATAcide.” Adbusters | Journal of the Mental Environment (04/09/2014).
19 | Resources
V. RESOURCES
Reading
[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
V. RESOURCES 16. Hargittai, Eszter. “Open doors, closed spaces? Differentiated adoption of social network sites by user background.” Race after the Internet. New York: Routledge (2012): 223-245. 17. Heidegger, Martin. “The question concerning technology.” Technology and values: Essential readings (1954): 99-113. 18. Hodgkinson, Anthony W., Marshall McLuhan, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. (1967): 311313. 19. Hudson, Dale. “Undesirable bodies and desirable labor: Documenting the globalization and digitization of transnational American dreams in Indian call centers.” Cinema Journal 49.1 (2009): 82-102. 20. Kittler, Friedrich. “Thinking colours and/or machines.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006): 39-50. 21. Lovink, Geert. Networks without a cause: A critique of social media. Polity Press, 2011. 22. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (2001): 1862 23. Mcluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. (1964): 1-45 24. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: an ethnographic approach. Berg. (2000). 25. Senninger, Tom. The Learning Zone Model, Thempra Social Pedagogy. 26. Squires, Judith. “Fabulous feminist futures and the lure of cyberculture.” The cybercultures reader (2000): 360-373. 27. Winner, Langdon. The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. University of Chicago Press, 2010. 28. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, and Nicholas Gane. “Friedrich Kittler: an introduction.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006): 5-16
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[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
V. RESOURCES Watching
Listening
29. Black Mirror (TV Series; Charlie Brooker) 30. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (Adam Curtis) 31. Hypernormalisation (Adam Curtis) 32. Ex Machina (Alex Garland) 33. The Congress (Ari Folman) 34. Generation Like (Douglas Rushkoff) 35. This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (Fraumeni, Pintoff) 36. Metropolis (Fritz Lang) 37. Automata (Gabe Ibanez) 38. The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) 39. Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood) 40. Coding Culture: Bangalore’s Software Industry (Gautam Saunti, Carol Upodhya) 41. The Circle (James Ponsoldt) 42. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) 43. Her (Spike Jonze) 44. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick) 45. Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick) 46. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick) 47. AI (Steven Spielberg) 48. Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski) 49. Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (Werner Herzog)
50. Art & Heidegger - Barbara Bolt (Lecture) 51. Dronestream - Josh Begley (Thesis Presentation) 52. Naked Lunch | Media Evolution Conference James Bridle (Lecture) 53. Technology Post Heidegger - >ect (Podcast) 54. Ten Paradoxes of Technology - Andrew Feenberg (Lecture) 55. What is Technological Sovereignty - Evgeny Morozov (Lecture) 56. You Are Not A Gadget - Jaron Lanier (Lecture) 57. New Media, Interactivity and 21st century 56. Aesthetics-Matt Nish Lapidus (Podcast) 58. Connected, but alone- Sherry Turkle (Lecture) 59. Speculative Everything at Resonate 2013Anthony Dunne (Lecture) 60. How Will We Live-Anab Jain (Talk)
21 | Resources
IV. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
[ AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP IN NEW MEDIA DESIGN: KSID REFLECTIONS ]
A huge thank you first of all to Susanth CS (Industrial Design Faculty) at NID, Bangalore for being the first person to suggest that we could take on this supermassive neutron star of a challenge. Also thank you Susanth for introducing us to Radhika Prasad (IT Integrated Communication Design Faculty) at KSID, Kollam - kind Radhika, your encouragement and trust have been indispensable to our effort. We simply couldn’t have pulled this workshop off without your support. To Jignesh Khakhar (New Media Design Course Co-ordinator) and Anand Sukumaran (Ethnographic Studies Visiting Faculty) at NID, Ahmedabad, the warmest hugs for being our guiding lights. And last but not the least, we send our love to Deepak Mallya for his consistent involvement throughout and the NMD 2015 batch for those wonderful late night huddles in the Meta Studio!
22 | Acknowledgments