CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTUAL STUDIES

CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTUAL STUDIES (CCS)
BY VIVIEN VAN DER SANDT
STUDENT NO: 06003781
email: viviensandt@yahoo.co.uk

IN THIS BLOG:
INTRODUCTION TO NEW MEDIA AND CCS
1. SUSTAINABILITY
2. DOUGLAS ENGELBART AND TED NELSON
3. PARTICIPATION

New media is a term that describes traditional forms of media that have been transformed by advancements in digital technology and digital computing…
The term new media gained currency in the early-mid 1990s as part of the marketing pitch for the CD-ROM Revolution...
What is classed as new media?
• Web Sites including Blogs and Wikis
• Email
• CD/DVD
• Electronic kiosks
• Virtual worlds
• Interactive Television
• Internet Telephony
• Mobile
• Podcast
• Hypertext fiction
[From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media]

The module Contemporary Contextual Studies looks at broad issues around new media/interactive media, discussing new developments, analysing trends and exploring issues. In that, it underpins all/most of the pursuits of students on the Design for Interactive Media course. In format, it comprises lecturers and discussion periods.

The importance of this field of study could be highlighted by my personal story: When I qualified as a journalist in the late '70s, newspapers emerged from the composition of metal type - 'slugs' of type were literally sorted by hand into printers' trays. In the last 30 years, I have seen printing and publishing become the domain of everyman, as the wordprocessor, the personal computer, an inestimable amount of software and - latterly but most importantly - the internet, revolutonised communication and access to information. Keeping up with the technology sometimes seems impossible; analysing the trends/consequences perhaps more so. But I consider it a great privilege to be a witness to this revolution, and to have the opportunity to upgrade my media skills. This module has made a valuable contribution to that. For these reasons, the concerns and contents of the CCS module are of great interest to me. Some of the subjects covered in this module are discussed below.

1. SUSTAINABILITY

“Sustainability is an attempt to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the indefinite future. It relates to the continuity of economic, social, institutional and environmental aspects of human society, as well as the non-human environment. It is intended to be a means of configuring civilization and human activity so that society, its members and its economies are able to meet their needs and express their greatest potential in the present, while preserving biodiversity and natural ecosystems, and planning and acting for the ability to maintain these ideals in a very long term. Sustainability affects every level of organization, from the local neighborhood to the entire planet”. Wikipedia

Everything that sustains life, everything we use, comes from Mother Earth: The houses we build, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, even the appliances and machines we use … all came from the Earth in the form of natural resources, vegetable and mineral (or animal, also sustained by the earth).
For centuries now, since the Industrial Revolution, the prevailing thought has been that science/technology and economic development would provide all human needs - food, clothing and shelter; jobs, education and healthcare. Little attention was paid to the depletion of resources required to provide increasingly comfortable, even affluent, lifestyles for the world’s burgeoning population.
Although the term sustainability can be traced as far back as in 1712 (first used by the German forester and mining scientist Hans Carl von Carlowitz in his book Sylvicultura Oeconomica) it was only in the 1960s, with the blossoming of the modern environmental movement, that a critical mass of people began to think about their impact on Planet Earth. Unavoidably, the economic/technology model was put under the spotlight.

In 1974, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth. – a report that predicted dire consequences as a result of humans depleting the Earth's resources. It advocated as one solution the abandonment of economic development – most amazing, bearing in mind that the Club (founded the previous year) comprised a group of economists and scientists (the two disciplines, as is explained above, at the forefront of resource exploitation) Needless to say, they were heavily criticized - not least of all by economists and scientists!

The conventional wisdom has been that the Earth’s resources fall into two categories: renewable and non-renewable. Renewable resources such as forests, crops, fishery, were for a long time considered almost inexhaustible. But now conventional wisdom is changing, and it is accepted that every resource has its limits.

Global consumption now threatens almost every resource on which we depend for our very existence. We are now warned that we will need four/five more planets like ours, to sustain our current levels of consumption. (This finding comes from studies on the ecological footprint - a formula used to determine the amount of land and water area a human population would need to provide the resources required to support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology. The term was first coined in 1992 by Canadian ecologist and professor, William Rees).
“Footprinting is now widely used around the globe as an indicator of environmental sustainability. It can be used to measure and manage the use of resources throughout the economy. It is commonly used to explore the sustainability of individual lifestyles, goods and services, organisations, industry sectors, regions and nations.” (Wikipedia)

Many believe that we are now past the point of no return. The measures that need to be taken to reduce consumption and restore natural resources need to be deeply, deeply radical – and there is no sign that any government is prepared to introduce these measures. One wonders if you can blame them when local councils have an uphill struggle getting all households to even recycle – an easy step that makes a big difference to ‘stretching’ resources - a sign of how ignorant and uncaring a large part of the populace remains. (A recycling target of 40% is considered a good result, and only a few councils in the UK achieve that). But another explanation is that government is so locked into big business, that it will not impose the consumption-reducing measures that are urgently needed.

Meanwhile, ountries like China are consuming resources like there is no tomorrow … and, of course, for many there well may not be (more about that later). In addition, corporations/big business are pulling out the stops to drive consumption. Some governments – and here the US government of George Bush is a prime culprit – still propagate the myth that technology will come to our rescue (he repeated this corporate/government propaganda in his State of the Nation speech this month).

I am more inclined to take the view of James Lovelock, a writer and environmentalist whose views I respect. In his latest book, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back - and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006), he takes a grim view of the future. He sees a world devastated by climate change, leaving much of the world's land uninhabitable and unsuitable for farming.

Writing in the Independent in January 2006, he said “we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can".

Lovelock has a poor prognosis for mankind’s future and takes the view that small communities of people who have made their way of life sustainable (in terms of goegrahical location, energy sources, food production and so on) may survive.
With all these considerations put together, I have over recent years changed my personal definition of the term 'sustainable'. I do not believe this planet as a whole will be sustainable in the future, but it may be possible for smaller communities of people to create sustainable environments. Ironically in the age of globalisation, that means creating an existence independent of national grids and governmental services. It seems it’s a matter of ‘head for a commune’ for anyone with any common sense/survival instinct. Apparently, the hippies were right all along.



2. DOUGLAS ENGELBART AND TED NELSON

Although it may not seem obvious at first sight, the closing comments in the Sustainability section connect fairly seamlessly to this next topic.

1968. The assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy rock America. Abroad, the Viet Cong launch the Tet offensive, an unexpected attack on 30 cities and US bases. The hippy movement is in full swing; the quintessential 60s novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe, is published. But, amid the social upheaval, technological advances march on - it is the year before the moon landing (for those who believe it actually happened, that is): Kodak’s cheap, compact instamatic camera hits the shops and, at a Conference in San Francisco, electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart addresses delegates via a TV set, and announces the beginnings of 'the Online System'.

At academic institutions, these two strands of American life - that is, the social upheavel and the technological developments - co-exist uneasily, as the values of the hippy movement clash with those of the Establishment. (This is to culminate two years later, when the Ohio National Guard opens fire on demonstrating students, killing four and wounding nine. In its wake, hundreds of academic institutions are closed as eight million students strike).

This is the environment that nurtured two very different pioneers in IT development, the aforementioned Englebart and another, Ted Nelson.

Dr Douglas C. Engelbart, best known as co-inventor of the computer mouse (with Bill English) was a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world's increasingly more urgent and complex. He and his team at the Augmentation Research Center (the lab he founded) developed computer-interface elements such as bit-mapped screens, groupware, hypertext and precursors to the graphical user interface. ARC was founded to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line System, better known by its odd abbreviation, NLS.

Nelson (who had obtained a Bachelor's degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959 and a Master's degree in sociology from Harvard University in 1963)founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. He envisaged Xanadu as a world-wide electronic publishing system that would create a universal library open to all. He coined the term 'hypertext' in 1963 and published it in 1965. His concrete contributions are harder to quantify and his Xanadu project has been criticised for failing to deliver. He revels in his reputation as a 'contrarian' and probably does make a valuable contribtion to debate. His attempts to keep IT developments open and accessible to all are admirable.

The two men have two very different approaches and philosophies but both have, in their different ways, added to the sum of Information Technology. And the two strands of influence outlined above - broadly, Corporate/Government America vs freedom-loving America, still underpins much of IT development.




3. PARTICIPATION

And, as further proof that all things are connected, that could take us again fairly seamlessly into the subject of participation.

It is a wise adage that 'communication is not what is imparted, communication is what is received'. All communication becomes meaningless without a receptor. To make communication meaningful, the receptor has to participate. This essential requirement for a viewer/audience is summed up by the often-asked question: “If a tree falls, unobserved, in a forest – did it happen? (Alternatively, if a tree falls unobserved in a forest, did it make a sound?)

Until only a few decades ago, the mass media offered only a few opportunities for audiences to participate, such as phone-in talk shows or (for the print press) letters to the editor. Now technology (new media/ electronic media) has made possible participation to a much larger degree than previously, such as:
Press: Readers can vote on editorials
Television: Interactive polls ask for the opinions.
Websites allow immediate electronic responses.

Most of these are driven not only by technological advances but also by the underlying philosophy that humans are not passive receptacles for information, but participants who can add to the medium and the message.

At extreme reach, citizen journalism is a manifestation of participation. In this case, laymen have control over input – previously the realm of only paid professionals.

Participation is also happening on another level. In the past, viewers/listeners had to make an appointment with the programmes they wanted to receive (barring of course, if they recorded them) but now programmes are being presented as downloadable items available to watch as and when we wish. Online news allows us to select only the stories we want to read (as opposed to a newspaper one has to page through, thereby scanning most of it), some digital stations (such as Sky Plus) allow the viewer to pause or fast forward through programmes.

The BBC are developing an Interactive Media Player (iMP) - a broadband service that allows audiences to use the internet to download and watch programmes from BBC TV and Radio. Users can also set iMP to download programmes that they'll miss, which are coming up over the next seven days. iMP is similar to the bbc.co.uk RadioPlayer which allows one to listen to any BBC radio programme from the last seven days. The main difference with iMP is that audiences will be able to access TV programmes as well.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/askbruce/articles/bbc.co.uk/imp_1.shtml

Channel 4 has just launched C4OD (Channel 4 On Demand).

The art world – being essentially media, and quick to exploit new trends and technology, and try to give meaning to them – have integrated the principles of participation and interactivity. The work of Installation artist Claire Bishop and Helio Oiticica's participatory environments are two examples of this.

Technological developments are changing the nature of art, journalism and media journalism by enabling greater participation. It is perhaps too early to quantify and analyse the ultimate impact on society. The current obsession with triviality, celebrity and popular culture does not suggest that new media is automatically going to create more educated and informed individuals.