Four guidelines for conquering new media

By Matthew Gillis

After a semester of exploring new media, I’ve decided to reflect on the digital experiences I’ve had and decide which lessons are worth taking with me as I continue to venture into the ever-changing world of technology. I’ve compiled a list of the four biggest lessons I’ve learned throughout my digital adventures that one should follow when conquering new media.

1. Create your own new media. As we’ve discovered, we’re all submerged in a world that is dominated by technology (whether we like it or not), and we’re dependent on it in order to function in society. Technology structures the way we maintain communication, from the use of cell phones to Facebook, to how we educate ourselves, from Google searches to social bookmarking. But the biggest lesson I’ve learned from our use of technology is that we have to learn how it works and the best way to do so is by creating our own new media. In the introduction to Douglas Rushkoff’s book Program or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age, he stresses that in order to maintain control in a world dominated by digital technologies, one must learn how they work to be able to manage his or her everyday life. Learn HTML, start a blog, or make a Twitter. Don’t you want control over your reality?

2. Embrace technology. The benefits of using many of the new media technologies that I’ve written about throughout the semester are seemingly endless. Specifically, social bookmarking sites like Pinterest, Google Reader, and Delicious make gathering information easier and faster than ever before and supplement traditional media forms, such as newspapers and encyclopedias. Take advantage of our culture of shared thinking by connecting with others on LambdaMoo or by sharing your “random, fleeting observations,” which Julian Dibbell describes in “Future of Social Media: Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought,” on Twitter. Without a doubt, I’ve learned that there’s no harm in trying these technologies, which aim to comfort us and make our lives easier. You’re only doing yourself a disservice if you don’t.

3. New media isn’t perfect. Danah Boyd writes in her article “Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitious Web 2.0 Technologies for Everyday Life,” “As you build technologies that allow the magic of everyday people to manifest, I ask you to consider the good, the bad, and the ugly.” While you should take advantage of the benefits of new media, don’t forget that technology is not perfect, as I’m sure many of you have frustratingly experienced before. Your iPhone could break at any minute, your Wi-Fi could go down without warning, and your Facebook could become hacked. While new technologies usually generate utopian hopes for its users, as Fred Turner describes in “How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology,” it’s important to be aware that technology isn’t actually foolproof. In the same token, it’s important to question what you see when using these new technologies. In an age where everyone is a publisher online with sites such as Wikipedia, information is bound to be wrong. We can’t expect that what we’re reading is perfectly correct, or else we all may fall into a culture of misinformed people.

4. Look out for the future. I know it may seem impossible to predict what’s coming next in regard to new media, but I think it’s important to the process of deciding how to interact with the technology around us. As I wrote about it my last post, I believe that technology is headed toward a reduction of information with the use of imagery over text as seen in technologies such as Pinterest and Instagram. It’s important to be prepared for new technologies by educating ourselves about imagery as a communication form, for example, especially because that new media may end up being a part of our everyday lives.

Now go forth and dive into our media-filled world.

A photo-filled future

By Matthew Gillis

Predicting the future of technology is like asking someone to fly to the moon; it’s nearly impossible, unless, of course, you’ve got genius connections. How can one predict something that literally changes from day-to-day?

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, I think you understand that much of our daily lives depend upon technology. But more specifically, much of that technology involves the Internet, and I believe that future technology will too. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. That’s not a very groundbreaking prediction. However, I believe that even more aspects of our lives will be experienced online, from high school education to religious ceremonies.

But, surprisingly, it isn’t the idea of spending our lives on the virtual reality of the Web that scares me. It’s the continual reduction of information used to communicate online that does. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the way that the Internet and the tools we use from it shape how we maintain relationships through communicating. Like many of my peers, I was introduced to social networking with the ever-popular MySpace, where I was able to have complete control over my profile design, bio, interests, music, and heroes, among other categories. Once MySpace wasn’t “cool” anymore, I migrated to Facebook, where control over my profile’s design was lost. Similarly, expressing interests and music on Facebook is limited to a single picture of the activity or musician, for example, of which you have no control over. Even between these two social networks, I’ve seen how communicating your public image online is depending on less and less information, from the use of lengthy bios to now displaying a row of “interest” picture icons.

It seems that visuals, such as Facebook’s icons, are replacing the extensive forms of communication. Just look at an iPhone. The rows of app icons replace text-based descriptions.

I predict that the future of technology will be dependent on visuals rather than text. We may even be in the midst of this visual-focused future right now. Just look at the popularity of photo-sharing technologies such as Pinterest and Instagram. While I enjoy photography as a form of expression, I don’t think that pictures can replace text-based communication. Just as movies haven’t replaced books, I don’t think that photos can replace text. (I mean, who actually enjoys the movie version of a book over the book itself?)

Photo By Matthew T. Gillis/Instagram.

But it’s more than just my personal opinion that leads me to this concern. Our current educational system is still based on the use of text as the primary form of communication. Until schools begin giving courses on how to interpret imagery as a form of communication and how to produce such images appropriately, the future of image-based technology is quite frightening.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Just because you can take pictures, doesn’t mean you should.

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Find me on Instagram: mattgillis

The age of digital dependence

By Matthew Gillis

I think it’s safe to say that all of us have experienced a time when the technology we take for granted suddenly stops working. Luckily enough, it’s happened to me more than once in the past week.

The exact moment in which you discover that the technology is broken becomes filled with emotions: shock, wondering how something you’re so dependent on is even capable of breaking, panic over how to fix it, and anxiety over being yelled at by your mom for “not appreciating anything you get.”

On Friday, my digital camera stopped working, and yesterday, my Internet wouldn’t load Delicious’ webpage (which is ironic, due to the fact that this was the only webpage I needed to access).

This range of emotions that came with the frustration of my nonfunctioning technology got me thinking about my dependence on technology. I was feeling all of these things at once because I knew I needed to use this technology but had no knowledge of how to fix it.

In an age where everything in our lives exists through technology or is online, how do we face the inevitable glitches? Are we putting everything important to us at risk in the hands of a technology that is bound to have flaws?

Today, after my Internet finally let me access Delicious, I perused the site and found myself particularly fond of its overall purpose. In essence, the site acts as a digital bookmark for everything and anything you find interesting on the web.

After bookmarking several websites, blogs, and articles and creating “stacks” that pertain to my interests, I became intrigued at its feature of putting everything I selected in one designated place. I could put everything I found on the web on my own single profile. Everything.

From variability, in which each user can customize his or her individual stacks, to hypermedia, which allows users to connect media to their profile, Delicious is the embodiment of the principles of new media as described by Lev Manovich in “The Language of New Media.”

I can’t help but wonder if Delicious and similar sites, like Pinterest, are slowly replacing traditional pen and paper bookmarking. While I find it to be a very beneficial tool, I feel a sense of reluctance to put everything of importance on a technology I know nothing about.

In summarizing my concerns, I turn to Danah Boyd‘s article “Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies for Everyday Life,” in which she writes, “As you build technologies that allow the magic of everyday people to manifest, I ask you to consider the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

I can only imagine the day when my digital bookmarking tool, which could eventually become a place for not only my favorite sites to be stored, but also my entire reality, stops working.

I doubt then that the worst of my problems would be my mother’s reaction.

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If you’re interested in other media and technology-related blogs, which I follow using Google Reader, check out: Technology in the Arts, CNN Tech, New York Times: Technology, Technology Review, and The PhotoArgus.