Musings on the Current Goings-on in Participatory Media

Placeness can be equated with loosely defined notions of community in a centrally defined location. The physicality of said placeness is becoming less and less tied to architecture - built structure, and more to the abstract network. The socio-conservatives champion the value of evocative domicile and contextually designed public space - drawing on the masters of the earlier age of romanticism and micro-tech deficiency. Said champions often disregard the baroque approach often taken with physical structure,

Feng shui teaches the value of thoughtful consideration of livable space [along with some other stuff]. MySpace teaches the value of making an ugly webpage with lots of anachronistic animated gifs and pictures of too young girls wearing too little. LiveJournal teaches the value of online journaling – personal expression with a social output. MeetUp teaches the value of getting a bunch of people with similar interests to… meet up. In a sense, all of these applications promote real, physical social interaction over the cyber. These services provide both a gateway and a glue. The most interesting point in these services is the network aspect. Participants are linked to everyone in a huge social system based on real interactions. Nodes [users, or their avatars] are directly linked to many, abstractly linked to all.

One could argue that the above is more important than a physical place in containing social interactive context. Created space – and the social community centered place – is daunting to those outside the fixed, static network of members. The casual abstraction the digital world allows [really, its shortcomings in the bandwidth of reality portrayal] for a casual interpretation of social networks, with real ramifications. The investment is the same – both social and personal – for participants in a im-chat and a coffee shop meet up.

The viral nature inherent in successful social applications and why traditional business models won't work

There seems to be a page in every newspaper [read: traditional media platform] devoted to the validity of blogging in the context of journalism and serious media publishing. This rise to maintain and re-affirm the necessity of MSM [mainstream media] was tired from its onset. The same trends can be seen throughout the entertainment industry (of which journalism is really a part of) in their stubborn ignorance and defense of their supposed market-right. MSM and Indie publishing are very clearly separated in their respective current states within the present media zeitgeist.

The nature of the new media vehicles - blogs, vlogs, podcasts, social software, wikis - is prohibitive to subscription. These platforms are [usually] based on a highly specialized reader base - and very much in tune with the 'indie' scenes surrounding 'emerging' culture.

Direct marketing strategies seem to fail with increasing frequency - despite tireless efforts by the digital production behemoths. This can be observed on all fronts from software to social applications to digitally produced media. The standards of worth have been thrown into disarray by the removal of the substance - the physical. Consumers can't hold - touch - digital media - only consume, digest, and respond.

A large part of this issue is the fact that social applications are geared towards two people consumers and contributors. The successful social applications melt these two people into some kind of mega-user - aside from 'the leach'.

Leaches are pure consumers in a participatory system - users who take, but don't give. Their presence is seen in every application - web communities like MySpace, Wikipedia, Digg, file-sharing apps... These users benefit from the active engagements and productivity of a given app's pool of involved contributor-consumers.

Social applications rely on a community of creative producers - participant users. Again, the scope is often narrow, and users can frequent - inhabit multiple forums [even at once - layered existence - dimensional onion-skinning]. The communities [codified in the applications, forums, chats...] are both network and node - in a vast web of exchange.

Systems of Organization for Media Intangible to the Meat

A huge problem digital media consumers are having lies in organizing content, and accessing stored content in some intuitive way. Technologists and consumers are beginning to realize that digital media is inherently dissimilar from the [now] archaic media vehicles of yesterday. Clay Shirky speaks about 'getting off the shelf' - which is the right idea, but he seems to be stuck on tags - which just adds another dimension to 'the shelf' - and doesn't nearly offer a greater solution to the liquid malleability of information. The fathers of information theory determined that information can be quantified and measured - in terms of amount, content, and transfer. Intuitive design for human consumption is more difficult a task - and one rooted in philosophy, sociology, physics, genetics, psychology... well, everything.

This has everything to do with the new media. Statistics on the current information transfer and creation rates are staggering. People are creating so much damn content we don’t know what to do with it all. The Friday lecture on memory vs. storage was most interesting in the organic personification of human realities placed on digital media vehicles. Artificial forgetting is such a novel concept. I believe this is the wrong outlook. Filtering should solve our issues, not deletion.

Ubiquitous Content Production and Platform Saturation

Everyone has an opinion on accessible means of creation and the suitable contextual application of the resultant production – the fruit of the digital publishing revolution. The issue lies in contextual content - "is any of it any good?" and "what's it for?" One could argue for the addition of free time into the layman's life. Or, related, the ubiquitous notion of beauty and the break from organized cultural standards. By this, I mean the break of ephemeral, ornamental creation with the institution (church / state - often the same). The ‘institution’ has, of course, taken on a new face – the afore mentioned ‘corporate behemoth.’

Media saturation is affiliated with storage, classification, and filtering – all the same thing, really. New standards are needed to contain these three issues, a change in both the actual content and the means of organization and display. The actual production of content is never a negative thing, as in metaphysics, the world is very stimulating – but we have tools to deal. The difficulty lies in creating or adaptively evolving these tools to not only protect ourselves from the insanity of an unfettered battery of… stuff, but to also allow us access to what we want and need.