Saturday, April 18, 2009

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] NEW MEDIA: USER'S BEHAVIOUR, SOCIAL SYSTEMS, AND THE BODY POLITIC

Dear Veroniki, all,
 
In addition to positive and negative effects of new media, there are side effects which are not very pleasant: new media technologies create nervous problems that prevent people from moving certain organs, such as their fingers on mobile phones.
 
Child-parent relations can also be affected. Everything goes fine as long as the children are watching their favorite cartoon show. But sometimes the owner of the Dish has a technical problem that causes the loss of transmission, or he simply loses connection with the satellite when the electricity goes off (as in Lebanon). If this happens during peak times, a sub-community is formed: parents shouting, complaining, and begging the owner of the Dish to solve the problem quickly because their children are deprived from their favorite cartoon channel, and are crying, panicking, getting hysterical and losing conscience! Parents are worried about how this would reflect on the stability of their children's minds in the future. The psychological consequences of such an aggressive event are overwhelming. Children think that their parents are behind the cut transmission. Parents can easily feel this tacit or explicit accusation and want to get rid of the guilt
they are suddenly facing.
 
Ricardo
 


________________________________
From: Veroniki Korakidou <vkorakidou@yahoo.gr>
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 10:39:16 AM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] NEW MEDIA: USER'S BEHAVIOUR, SOCIAL SYSTEMS, AND THE BODY POLITIC

Dear Ricardo et al.,
 
I wish to refer to one incident that happened last week here in Athens, which I find related to this discussion.
 
A 19-year old boy, suffering from some kind of social rejection from his peers and love-life dissappointment, wrote a suicide letter and uploaded on "myspace" photos of himself, aiming at the camera with a gun, and three hours later he took with him two more shotguns and a knife, went off to his class where he shot one of his colleagues and two more people before committing suicide himself.
 
Criminologists who sketched his profile, claimed that after-death reputation was a motivation for this young isolated boy, who had no friends in real life, for commiting such an unthinkable crime. There are more "media" implications to that, as the traditional media, TV, newspapers etc. covered the story which actually made him" (in)famous", after his death. However, I think that this incident is indicative of an (anti)social behavior that already exists on the net, also, along with other behavioural trends.
 
Virtual communities are consisted from "real" people. In order to put some of this problematic in the context of Vitor's question, with regards to new media literacies, I am sceptical, as to whether we are still talking about a new medium, for instance, is the internet a mass medium?
 
If so, "who", is sending the "message" to "whom" and for "what purpose"?
 
Although I am currently an avid follower of all these "trendy" social networking websites, from "myspace" to "hi5", "facebook" and now further on to "twitter", I have to say, these traditional and old-fashioned questions come to my mind each time a new one pops-up, making me all the more skeptical about the social dynamics of these "new" media social user's behaviour, social systems and the body politics.
 
Social "networking" to me looks like an iinteractive "vast wasteland" (I am sure this characterization certainly rings a bell to social thinkers among this list about the critical analysis of media content during the 90s), where you can meet some interesting people, your firiends, fight for good causes, buy barbie dolls and, of course, occasionally be tracked by the secret services.
 
Now you can also meet young boys who wish to become mass killers before comitting suicide themselves.
 
Sounds like good old-fashioned capitalism, only now, you can "virtually" "interact" with it, because literaly, you cannot even touch it.
 
This is the medium, and it's message.
 
Best,
 
Veroniki

--- Στις Δευτ., 13/04/09, ο/η Ricardo Mbarkho <ricardombarkho@yahoo.com> έγραψε:

Από: Ricardo Mbarkho <ricardombarkho@yahoo.com>
Θέμα: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] NEW MEDIA: USER'S BEHAVIOUR, SOCIAL SYSTEMS, AND THE BODY POLITIC
Προς: "YASMIN DISCUSSIONS" <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Ημερομηνία: Δευτέρα, 13 Απρίλιος 2009, 19:06

Hi Tereza, Jordan, Vitor, and all,


When interacting with the network, the active citizen is not often active in
content filtering. Some people tend to be very receptive to mass media and the
huge amount of information, which is often contradictory. Consequently, their
identities and roots are blurred and they can fall into the trap of being
fragmented into pieces of identities. Some might even be ready to defend their
new but fake identity, whose real owners might have thrown away and whose new
owners might have found somewhere on the information sphere.


After reading Jordan's post about assemblage, and Tereza's saying
"human beings may be considered, after Jordan's explanation, as an
assemblage of consciousness", and Vitor post about Media literacy
what would be the positioning toward the above statement? Can we enhance the
way we critic media content (media literacy), and thus be protected from
identity scrambling? Or on the opposite, we can simply consider that there is no
identity crisis at all here, because it's all a matter of assemblage? In this
last case, what would be the assemblage's crisis?


Best,
Ricardo

     
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