The Social Media Revolution: Expanding Platforms

YouTube video: The Social Media Revolution 2012

 

Even before watching that clip of information, we all know how powerful social media has become. In lecture we discussed the idea of ubiquity as omnipresent, being everywhere all at once. We evaluated the presence of social media and computer-human interaction in our daily lives through the theory of 'ubiquitous computing.'

There is no doubt that humanity is fully integrated into technology and computing, and with that said, Joe Salvo believes the information age to be over. Wesley Dodson (2009) posted Salvo's ideas on Collective Imagination to Science Blogs in his article, "The Dawn of the Systems Age." Dodson references Salvo explaining that the information is, "a period of history [that] can be characterized by the dominant technology that separates the leaders from the followers." Salvo claims that we have a reached the point where that separation no longer exists, which is why he suggests the "systems age" is next. The systems age involves sensing, collecting and manipulating data in real-time with minimal regulation and human supervision. Salvo postulates a bold but noteworthy idea: artificial intelligence will become the keepers of the digital sphere.

So if we are entering the systems age, it is important to consider what we are doing within these systems. The information age might be coming to an end, but it is still information that the systems are distributing and circulating. Hubert Guillard, Truthout blogger, reported ideas about "What is implied by living in a world of flow." Guillard references sociologist Danah Boyd who explains why living in a world of information is a powerful notion. Boyd says this idea suggests that we exist inside the living stream of content: we add to it, we consume it and we redirect it. Essentially, we are the system. Boyd, as cited by Guillard, explained that we have transitioned from broadcast media to networked media, which has fundamentally transformed the way information flows. Guillard supports Boyd's ideas and goes on to explain that internet technologies dismantle and rework the structures of distribution. If distribution changes, information circulates differently. The question everyone is trying to answer, is how.

Personal involvement in the social media craze

Here is a word web of the online platforms and media systems that I currently (or at some time in the past five years) have engaged in:

The mind map illustrated above shows my social media usage in isolation from the network. Once networked together, each individual web would connect and look something like the image displayed below. Imagine an infinite series of these webs, all connected.

Click here for outside image source.

After watching the Social Media Revolution You Tube video and considering the amount of time I spend interacting with each of these platforms, I am reminded that I am just as much a part of those statistics as the person sitting next to me, as the person sitting next to them and so forth. Even in another country, half way around the world, it still does not take many people to find a mutual interest or friend inside the intricate social webs of the internet. 

Sources:
ARTS 2090 lecture slides, see week 10

Dodson, Wes (2009) ‘Dawn of the Systems Age’, Page 3.14

Guillaud, Hubert (2010) (on Danah Boyd) ‘What is implied by living in a world of flow?’, Truthout

Worb-web and mind-map creator, text2mindmap.com

Science of Earth: Visualized

Wired posted an article by David Mosher entitled, "The 16 Best Science Visualizations of 2011," exhibiting the top designs from the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. One of the competition judges, Thomas Wagner, a cryosphere scientist at NASA, commented on the development of science visualization. He said, "I think because information technology tools and visualization tools have advanced, people have found ever-increasingly clever ways to display difficult scientific concepts."

A similar Wired article, also posted by Dave Mosher, illustrated another example of complex scientific data made visual through, "Video: 10 Years of Fires on Earth Seen from Space." Over the past decade, NASA has recorded tens of millions of fires that burned all over the planet using a pair of earth monitoring satellites. NASA engineers took the ten years of data and created animated visualizations demonstrating the Earth's cycle of vegitation, weather, ocean systems etc. It is through these animated visualizations that this data becomes relevant to the general public. In a sense, accessible visualization tools have given complex scientific topics relevance again in the public sphere.

There is more and more discussion about ways to collaborate these visualizations. So much buzz is generating new projects for collective thinking and creating. The goal of many of these platforms is to archive not only the final presentation but to accurately archive the thought process humans are exhibiting whilst interacting with nonhuman machines. It is through the complexity of visualizations that researchers and theorists can begin to explore the methods of thinking and brainstorming that internalized within each research topic.

The Dynamic Media Network posted an intriguing article: "Assembling Collective Thought," by Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie. Munster and Murphie define the assemblage for collective thought (ACT) as, "an ongoing conceptual and aesthetic collaboration" and further as, "an assemblage of technologies and techniques for collaboration." They assert that ACT enables participants to 'think' collectively and conceptually; ACT considers the type of thought that is produced "in the middle of the very act of collaboration, when DJing, VJing, dancing in front of a camera." Munster and Murphie said that because so much new media composition and production concern itself with technological conduits and infrastructure, ACT fashions a kind of assemblage that explores new media to produce new concepts.

For more information about ACT and its development processes: Check this out!

Sources:
http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/publications/assembling-collective-thought-anna-munster-and-andrew-%20murphie

http://vogmae.net.au/vlog/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/science-visualization/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/wildfires-space-nasa/