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new media and technology, copyright, media theory

new media and technology, copyright, media theory

Internet Art

June 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

modern art meets digital technology – the latest results

As bandwidth has increased and rates for subscribing to it have dropped, so we have easier access to sites offering high quality graphics, animations, and even streamed videos. Digital artists can now make their work available to a very wide audience. This survey of contemporary internet art attempts to merge visual art with the digital world. It comes from the cheap-and-cheerful but excellent value ‘World of Art’ series of paperbacks from Thames and Hudson. As somebody who has recently started to experiment with Internet art – albeit in a Blogging sort of way – I bought this book thinking it would give me some new ideas. It did – but it’s a lot more besides.

Internet ArtIt starts off quite usefully with a quick overview of computers and the Internet, then situates the origins of Net art in the experimental art of the 1960s and 1970s. I was surprised Rachel Greene didn’t have examples from these early years. For instance, it’s half way through the book before she even mentions ASCII art.

Instead, she pitches straight into Web-based ‘happenings’ from the 1990s, where web sites are used to co-ordinate and publicise public events – usually of a ‘situationist’ type. The most interesting innovation which I had not seen before is ‘Browser Art’- where browsers are re-programmed using JavaScript and Perl scripts to simultaneously display a mosaic of materials from multiple sources. The other genre which seems promising is software art.

She is very well informed about what is going on in what I suppose still calls itself the avant-gard, so it’s all the more disappointing that her expression of it is clouded by the written style of the art school manifesto:

As site-specific sculpture operates vis-a-vis the particular components and ideologies of a place, so do many works of Internet art derive in significant ways from their location within a networked public field of vision and consumption.

Fortunately, the book is profusely illustrated, which helps you through two hundred pages of that sort of thing.

I was disappointed that she missed the chance to categorise the various genres of art object that are made possible by the Internet – the web site as display gallery, as record of an expedition, as interactive game or challenge, as multimedia experience, and so on – though she does discuss examples of each.

Blogging is covered in one sentence, and Flash animations don’t even get a mention. Even hypertextuality doesn’t get much of a look in, yet lots of space is devoted to silly art-school pranks and radical [for which read pretty useless] ‘experiments’.

Overall, this strikes me as a missed opportunity, because she clearly knows a lot about radical art of the 1990s, but her lack of historical and conceptual depth means she is unable to synthesise it. Instead, she provides a descriptive tour of various fin de siècle activist posturings, happenings, and staged art events about which most sane people will neither know nor care.

So far as I’m aware, the book on Internet Art has still to be written. Correct me if I’m wrong. Yet there’s bound to be something in here somewhere for anyone interested in the relationship between digital technology and art. Despite my reservations, I look forward to browsing some of the more inventive sites she lists in a well documented Webliography.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Rachel Greene, Internet Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004, pp.224, ISBN 0500203768


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Filed Under: Art, Media Tagged With: Art, Computers, Decorative arts, Internet art, New media, Technology

iPhone UK: The Missing Manual

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the book that should have been in the box

If you buy an iPhone, the one thing you don’t get is a manual telling you how it works. Oh sure – you can download a PDF file from a web site , but as David Pogue, author of this excellent guide observes, “it’s largely free of details, hacks, workarounds, tutorials, humour, and any acknowledgement of the iPhone’s flaws. You can’t mark your place, underline, or read it in the bathroom.” As most people know by now, the iPhone has completely transformed handheld mobile devices. It combines everything you need in portable computing – email, Internet access, photo and audio-visual storage, address-book, MP3 player, GPS device (maps) stock exchange figures, and games. It’s the ultimate all-in-one portable device. I’ve bought two of these shirt-pocket miracles in the last few weeks – and the first thing I wanted after opening the box was a manual.

iPhone UK: The Missing ManualIt’s true, they’re very easy to use, but I still needed help with some of the basics. The main learning curve with the iPhone is the nested menu system – and that’s clearly explained here. Basically, you’ve just got to drill down from one screen to another to find your stuff. But the manual is well illustrated with photos and screenshots, so that you know exactly what you should be looking at.

One feature of the iPhone that has made them best-sellers is the navigation system. It’s all done by touching, tapping, and sliding your finger across the screen. In case you didn’t know, apart from the on/off switch and the volume control, there’s only one button on the iPhone, and you actually don’t need that very much. Everything is done with one finger touching the screen.

iphoneAnd nothing can go drastically wrong, so you don’t need to worry. It’s no wonder that these devices have become popular so quickly. Quite apart from the ultra-cool design, you can download games, extras, and software novelties with no trouble at all. Many of them are completely free or amazingly cheap. For instance, the ‘Brushes’ graphic design program used to produce these stunning pictures costs only £2.99. At this price you can afford to give things a try – and it’s no tragedy if you decide not to bother.

The manual covers all aspects of the phone, and it also gives you a full guide to iTunes – the site from which Apple hopes you will download most of your music files. They currently sell for around £0.79 per track – but companies such as Amazon are currently undercutting them at £0.49 per track in an effort to capture the market.

The iPhone is of course a miracle of mobile phone technology: you can have all sorts of options – from visual voice mail to chat programs and free texting. Of course, out of the box, you are tied in to the O2 network service, but if you feel up to the challenge, you can get round this by ‘jailbreaking’ the phone. That will allow you to change ringtones and wallpaper, as well as choose your own mobile network. Details of how to do it are available here

There are two other things I like about the Missing Manuals. One is that they are not slavishly uncritical. If there’s a shortcoming with the product, they’ll mention it. And two – they’ll show you how to get round the problem. There are call-out boxes packed with hints, tips, and hidden workarounds.

You can also download movies, audio books, games, podcasts, TV programmes. You can even couple up your iPhone to your TV and watch videos on a full size screen. That’s why these slender hand-held computers are now regarded as something of a Killer Ap – because they have the capacity to combine all online services into one user-friendly, affordable device.

But what about all the free programs and software mentioned in the book? They’ve thought of that too. The book has its own web site where the latest versions of shareware and freeware are listed.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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David Pogue, iPhone UK: The Missing Manual, O’Reilly UK, 3rd edition, 2009, pp.416, ISBN: 0955750628


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Filed Under: Computers, Media Tagged With: Computers, iPhone, iPhone UK: The Missing Manual, Media, Mobile phones, Technology

iPod: The Missing Manual

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the book that  should have been in the box

I bought an iPod recently for playing MP3 music files – and I was amazed to discover that it does a lot more than that. The iPod is simply an iPhone without the phone – and this means a lot more than you might imagine. It plays music, sure enough, but it’s also got a wireless card, and that means you can surf the Web, get your emails, watch videos on YouTube, check the weather or the state of your stock market investments – and all this from a device you can comfortably keep in your top pocket.

iPod: The Missing ManualIt has all these features – and yet it doesn’t come with a guidance manual. You can download a PDF from the iTunes site, but reading manuals on screen is no joke – and the chances are that you’ll miss some of the amazing features on this device which is in the process of revolutionising our connections with the online world. In the last year alone, more than 20,000 small applications (Apps) have been written for the iPod and iPhone – and these are so accessible and so cheap, they are driving down the price of software everywhere.

I like the approach of the missing manual series, because they’re written with users’ needs in mind. For instance, the first thing anyone buying an iPod probably wants to know is – how can I get music onto this thing and start listening? And that’s exactly what comes up first in the manual – how to download tracks from iTunes, how to import a CD, and how to organise the music to suit your own needs.

The main learning curve with the iPod is the nested menu system – and that’s fairly clearly explained. Basically, you’ve just got to drill down from one screen to another to find your stuff. But the manual is well illustrated with photos and screenshots, so that you know exactly what you should be looking at.

iPod_touchAnd nothing can go drastically wrong, so you don’t need to worry. It’s no wonder that these devices have become so popular so quickly. Quite apart from the ultra-cool design, you can download games, extras, and software novelties with no trouble at all. Many of them are completely free or amazingly cheap. For instance, the ‘Brushes’ graphic design program used to produce these stunning pictures costs only £2.99. At this price you can afford to give things a try – and it’s no tragedy if you decide not to bother.

The manual covers the iPod Touch, the Classic, the Shuffle, and the Nano, and it also gives you a full guide to iTunes – the site from which Apple hopes you will download most of your music files. They currently sell for around £0.79 per track – but companies such as Amazon are currently undercutting them at £0.49 per track in an effort to capture the market.

There are two other things I like about the Missing Manuals. One is that they are not slavishly uncritical. If there’s a shortcoming with the product, they’ll mention it. And two – they’ll show you how to get round the problem. There are call-out boxes packed with hints, tips, and hidden workarounds. I discovered a really useful feature for anybody using an iPod whilst on the move: you can locate the nearest free WiFi hot spot simply by finding your location on Google Maps, then doing a search on WiFi.

You can also download movies, audio books, games, podcasts, TV programmes. You can even couple up your iPod to your TV and watch videos on a full size screen. That’s why these slender hand-held computers are now regarded as something of a Killer Ap – because they have the capacity to combine all online services into one user-friendly, affordable device.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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David Pogue, iPod: The Missing Manual, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2010, pp.304, ISBN: 1449390471


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Filed Under: Computers, Media Tagged With: Communication, Computers, iPod, iPod: The Missing Manual, Media, Technology

Literacy in the New Media Age

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

theoretical study of writing in the digital age

This is an investigation of the effect of new media on what Gunter Kress calls ‘alphabetic writing’. He is arguing that multimedia and the screen are starting to challenge the page as the natural medium of writing – and that this in turn is affecting the way we write. It’s certainly true that writing for the screen has to be more immediate and heavily chunked than writing for the page, and Kress also argues that the screen is making graphic images more important as a medium of communication.

Literacy in the New Media Age He points out quite rightly that speech and writing are two completely separate systems (which is why many people have problems with writing). The alphabet is actually a loose transcription system for translating between them. His basic argument is that all communication (including linguistics) should be seen as a subset of semiotics. There’s actually not very much about new media discussed – merely an assumption that iconic or visual communication is challenging the dominance of writing.

However, he does make the interesting observation that computers put users in charge of page layout in a way which gives new emphasis to design, as well as providing interactivity between writer and reader.

Having argued that all texts are a result of ideological relationships between author and reader, he even attempts a quasi-political analysis of punctuation. This is not really persuasive, and founders in his attempts to explain or excuse his examples of what is no more than poor writing.

But he does end on an interesting topic of reading paths. That is, the manner in which readers have to construct their own navigational routes when confronting what he calls ‘multimodal’ texts – ones with pictures and words, such as magazines and web pages, for instance.

Although he claims to have left behind an academic style so as to communicate with a wider audience, he writes in a dense and rather abstract manner. The results will be of interest to linguists, educational theorists, and semiologists – though those approaching it with an interest in new media might be a little disappointed.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.186, ISBN: 041525356X


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Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record

Norman Lebrecht is a writer and pundit specialising in classical music who often appears on Radio 3 taking phone-in commentaries on what the BBC supposes to be very controversial topics such as “Should government subsidise the Arts?” and “Is the Internet taking over from print journalism?”. He comes across in the spoken word as a pushy and self-aggrandising windbag, but I must say that in Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness the same approach makes for lively reading.

Maestros, Masterpieces and MadnessWhat he offers here is a history of recording classical music, from its faltering start at the beginning of the last century, to the present. His main argument is that what was at first perceived as a somewhat impure medium gradually took hold of the public imagination when the technology became affordable in the form of the LP record and then the CD. This led to an explosion of recording the classics which was fuelled by vainglorious recording companies and famous conductors alike. This accelerated until the whole system ground to a point of collapse brought on by their greed, by over-production, and a failure to see changes in mass media.

That’s the story in a nutshell, but it is told via a combination of detailed insider knowledge of how classical music works as a business, with celebrity vignettes, potted biographies, and what might be called lashings of The Higher Gossip.

Many of the principal conductors we think of as cultural icons and household names emerge from these pages as vain, self-seeking, and egotistical monsters – pocketing huge sums in secret deals behind the backs of their employers, and moving from one orchestra and city to another in a relentless search for more prestige.

This starts with figures such as the mercurial and dictatorial conductor Toscanini and the unscrupulous record producer Walter Legge, and then moves into more recent years with company takeovers which seem more motivated by whim and rivalry than any artistic or business logic.

He’s very well informed about all sorts of details. How Decca was a haven for gays (Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davis) and how Deutsche Grammophon (owned by Siemens) had used slave labour from the death camps to keep its empire going.

The golden years are awash with lucrative record deals, and projects which replicate every popular classic known to man, ten times over. But then in the 1960s things begin to change. That’s because the record companies suddenly realise that they are making more money out of pop music.

By the end of 1956 Elvis had sold $22 million worth of discs and merchandise in the US, half as much as the whole of the classical market.

From this point onwards there was a struggle between pop and classical in the board rooms. One brought in the money, the other wasted it on a prodigious scale. Despite a temporary revival with early music, the end was in sight. And when it came there was lots of grief and pain for everyone. By the time we reach Internet downloads and Peer-2-Peer filesharing, the game is up.

You’ll love this story if you are interested in behind-the-scenes of the music world, and gossip about those people with high reputations but much lower levels of behaviour. It’s got schadenfreude by the bucketload. (Actually, that’s a fair example of Lebrecht’s style rubbing off on me.)

And yet for all his dirt-dishing on the famous, he actually supports a high patrician line of cultural conservatism. You get a strong sense of regret that things have turned out as they have. He doesn’t see the process he describes as one of change, fuelled by one technology after another, which probably has more people listening to classical music than ever before – as I am doing right now, over the Internet.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Norman Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, London: Allen Lane, 2007, pp.324, ISBN: 0713999570


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Mediactive

December 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

new journalism, new publishing, new media

Mediactive is the latest stage in an argument that has been developing for some time now. In 2004 Dan Gillmor launched the notion of the ‘citizen journalist’ in his polemic We the Media. He argued that news is too important to be left entirely in the hands of professional journalists, and that bloggers (who were at that time a new phenomenon) had a corrective influence that should be encouraged. Since anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can start blogging within five minutes, it was in the power of ordinary people to create an additional and maybe an alternative voice to the established press and the broadcast media. They can also do this at virtually no cost, because the open source movement makes powerful software available to us free of charge. Since that time the sales of print newspapers have been plummeting, and bloggers have risen in importance and influence, to the extent that all major newspapers now have their own staff bloggers, having once ridiculed their very existence.

Mediactive Mediactive is Gillmor’s update to these arguments, in which he urges us all to become more active, sceptical, and open consumers of information – but also active participants in its creation. And he even provides the tools to do the job. In the past you needed to own printing presses, publishing companies, and distribution networks to make even the smallest item of information available to a wider audience. But now all that has changed. Because as he argues very persuasively (referencing Clay Shirky) – the barriers to entry are virtually zero. “You don’t need anybody’s permission, and you don’t need much money either”. In other words, individual entrepreneurs now have an entirely new opportunity to make information available to the public.

His book is in three parts: first, the arguments for becoming active in the creation of media (print, blogs, video, podcasts); second, the tools for engagement and how to use them; and third, the large socio-legal issues and conflicts in online advocacy and the realms of media literacy in education.

This is an interesting book in its own right as a physical object. Mediactive exists primarily as an on-going project, a web-based set of resources, of which this printed book is only one manifestation, which might well be called Version 1.0. Other manifestations already exist as web pages, and you can download the whole thing as a PDF file free of charge at Mediactive.com. In time, as new materials, updated evidence, modifications, and corrections are made, the version number will change – just as in the case of software at the moment.

Dan Gillmor is one of those people who believe that making books available as free downloads increases the sales of a print version. It has to be said that in this form of print on demand (POD) format these books are not very attractive. They have small page margins, the first lines of paragraphs are indented, typography is crude, and perhaps worst of all, underlining is used to show where hyperlinks exist in the online version.

It has no index, footnotes, or bibliography. All of these are available in the master copy which exists on line. It’s rather like a book that has been produced by an enthusiastic amateur using a desktop publishing kit. It’s also written in bite-sized chunks for reading on screen. What works in one medium doesn’t necessarily translate well without problems for another

However this is the Brave New World of publishing and distributing ideas, and I think we might expect a few rough edges in these emerging forms, just as I’m equally confident that production standards will rise as the form matures. If you don’t believe me, have a look at any document you produced twenty years ago.

Basically he wants us all to become more vigilant and active participants in using the new media tools at our disposal. His strongest argument in support of citizen media against traditional journalism and especially broadcast media is also its smallest and simplest elements – the hyperlink and the comment. If television news reports an event, we have no way of clicking through to check the source of the information or any alternatives there might be, and we have no way of offering corrective feedback or criticism.

Having urged participation, he then goes through the best known of the new media tools – blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and even content management systems (CMS), though like me, he drew the line at Drupal as a techie step too far.

All this creates an entirely new opportunity to the individual entrepreneur in any field of interest. That’s because the barriers to entry are virtually zero. “You don’t need anybody’s permission, and you don’t need much money either.”

He poses interesting questions and raises thought-provoking questions. For instance, the apparently simple query: “What is journalism?” If somebody documents arguments over a planning application to build a new factory in their neighbourhood on a blog – is that journalism? And if not, why not? His answer would be yes – because even though you are not paid for writing the article or employed by a newspaper, the article is performing the function of journalism by making information publicly available.

He also poses an interesting notion that is reflected in the very nature of the book itself. “When is a work complete?” Why shouldn’t a digital work live on and accrue to itself all the modifications, corrections, additions, and links to further information that become available over time? There is no reason why a book should not be like a Wikipedia entry – subject to constant updating and revision.

Of course this idea leads in turn to the question “What is a book?” – to which this production is an interesting answer. Of course we are accustomed to a book being a relatively static or fixed entity, existing in maybe at the most two or three editions. But there is no reason why we should not refer in future footnotes and references to Book Title, Version 3.1.5

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© Roy Johnson 2011


Dan Gillmor, Mediactive, Lulu.com, 2010, pp.183, ISBN: 0557789427


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MTIV: New Media Design

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new media design principles, plus tips on inspiration

Hillman Curtis is one of the new generation of multi-media designers – with a background in writing and rock music rather than art college. This is his credo on the process of professional new media design – which is centred on listening carefully to what clients want, and helping them to articulate their ideas. It’s a glamorous production, with big margins, glossy paper, and double-spread photos.

New Media Design In the first part of the book he spells out his approach to designing and managing projects. He gets his stimulus from magazines, movies, and other people’s Web sites, collecting examples of good design for inspiration. One of the main purposes of this book is to communicate this personal enthusiasm – which he does very well.

You feel as if you’re only a couple of steps away from your own award-winning designs. The down side is, he doesn’t go into any technical detail on how to do it. In the central section of the book he gives examples of the people whose work has inspired him – graphic designers Saul Bass, Kyle Cooper and Joseph Müller-Brockman, painter Mark Rothko, plus film directors David Mamet and Sydney Lumet.

I’ll visit a gallery, buy or borrow a few CDs, see a couple of movies, and study my favourite movies on DVD. I’ll read art history, film theory … and of course I immerse myself constantly in design books and magazines.

It’s interesting to note how the possibilities of motion and the Web has led to these Flash designers thinking of themselves as directors of sixty second movies which must deliver a theme, plus a coherent and complete experience.

When it comes to the technical matters discussed in part three, he hands over the baton to other writers, so what we get is a series of essays from experts. These are on colour theory, design with grids, font construction, and Web page layout. These are quite useful primers, particularly if you want a quick introduction to HTML and XML. He also includes a chapter on usability from Steve Krug’s excellent Don’t Make Me Think, and a there’s a finale encouraging would-be movie makers to try their hands at digital video.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Hillman Curtis, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.240, ISBN: 0735711658


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New Media in Late 20th-century Art

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new forms of multimedia, performance, and digital art

There’s nothing like discussing ‘contemporary’ art forms for making you realise we’re now in the twenty-first century. When you look at developments which seem quite recent (particularly related to the Internet) you suddenly realise that these were in the LAST CENTURY!! – (to sound for a moment a little like Tom Wolfe). The latter half of the nineteen hundreds saw artists breaking up the boundaries of aesthetic genres and introducing all sorts of new technology into their work – as well as mixing disparate activities into one experience. New Media in Late 20th-century Art is a survey of the new media which evolved roughly in the period 1950—2000.

New Media in Late 20th-century Art It covers the mixing of media and performance, video art, video installations, and the new forms of digital art. Starting from the notion that traditional Art has been a painting in two dimensions, Michael Rush looks at the extensions made by the twentieth century. It’s a beautifully illustrated book, with picture captions which explain the significance of each medium.

After an introductory consideration of the inclusion of Time, which is made possible by film, he passes into the early stages of media and performance. This covers the multimedia happenings which started with events organised by the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham organised in the 1960s. These mixed together various combinations of film, acting, music, and dance, and there began the widespread use of video film around the same time.

Performances range from video films of ultra-minimalist events such as hand gestures or people asleep, to live broadcasts of people commenting whilst under local anaesthetic on their own cosmetic surgery operations. Yes, it’s true.

There’s a lot of combining performance art with video recordings of it. Artists put themselves into embarrassing and even dangerous situations and record the consequences as a work of ‘art’. The problem for a lot of the art works created between the 1960s an 1980s is that there is little easily recoverable record of them. On the plus side, there are lots and lots of artists represented here – and their work is illustrated in colour with stills from exhibitions and ‘installations’.

The general problem with the survey is that most of its emphasis is on the content of the so-called art works, rather than the art itself. There is nothing new in an artist putting her adolescent traumas of sexual identity into a work of art just because it’s in the form of a video film.

The older artist to whom most repeated reference is made in the context of cross-boundary works is Marcel Duchamp, and the contemporary names which come up most frequently are Naim June Paik and Bill Viola, both installation artists. Most of these works seem to add up to multiple projections, using TV monitors or giant split screens

Bill Viola – ‘Acceptance’ 2008

A section on digital art attempts to bring things up to date with digitally altered photography and virtual reality programs. But in fact it’s very difficult to keep up with the developments of digital multimedia. I think the publishers will do Michael Rush a favour by publishing a second edition which allows him to add material on the Flash and Shockwave movies which are now sweeping the Web.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London: Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2005, pp.248, ISBN: 0500203784


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New Media Language

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new forms of language, rhetoric, and communication

This is a collection of papers given at a conference on ‘Language, Media, and International Communication’ at Oxford University. The contributions are from academics and journalists, and the best thing about them is that they are interestingly varied in topic and approach. Issues discussed include the manner in which the norms of communication in the English-speaking world are affecting speakers of other languages. The example given is of an assistant in MacDonald’s in Budapest who speaks Hungarian, but uses an Anglo-American ‘discourse’.

New Media LanguageRobin Lakoff also writes on the ‘new incivility’ – how swearing and bad manners have risen to the surface of public discourse, from the television chat show to the theatres of government in the west. Sometimes the arguments seem to take a sledgehammer to crack nuts. Martin Conboy’s otherwise excellent analysis of the language of hysterical chauvinism in The Sun could have been done without evoking references to Mikhail Bakhtin.

Despite the title of the book, the emphasis is more on media than on language. John Carey looks at the problems of establishing credulity in reportage, and there’s a well-informed piece on the BBC’s anguish regarding the middlebrow nature of Radio 4.

One of the best pieces in the collection is by co-editor Diana Lewis on the changes brought about to the concept of news and the way it is broadcast as a result of now being simultaneously available in so many different forms. It comes at us in traditional manner via newspapers, radio, and television – but to these are now added instantly updated web sites, news feeds, and personal blogs – all of which can come along with a huge variety of background and contextual materials, available at the click of a hyperlink. Have a look at any page on a Wikipedia entry, and you’ll see what she means.

I also enjoyed an amusing piece from the Guardian columnist Malcolm Gluck on the difficulty of describing wines without slipping into Pseud’s Corner prose. At a more serious level, there’s an excellent piece analysing the duplicitous and rhetorical devices used in White House press briefings, where the official spokespeople try to give away as little as possible, and the press representatives try equally hard to make them admit the truth of what is going on.

There are two good chapters from professional lexicographers. John Ayto looks at the way in which newspapers create neologisms by what’s called ‘blending’ – as in motel comes from a blend of motor + hotel. John Simpson, one of the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary, considers the problem of accepting new media forms such as film, tabloids, and email as the sources for word definitions.

It certainly deals with traditional as well as new media – because there’s lots on the press, particularly the tabloids. This will be of interest to students of media, communication skills, politics, and current affairs, as well as anyone who follows trends in current language use.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis, New Media Language, Abingdon: Routledge, 2003, pp.209, ISBN: 0415283043


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Filed Under: Language use, Media Tagged With: Communication, Language, Media, New Media Language, Theory

Open Source Research

September 5, 2010 by Roy Johnson

why tax-funded research should be in the public domain

Open Source Research offers a new challenge to higher education. In the UK a traditional academic teaching post carried three requirements – teaching, research, and administration. Time and energy were normally allocated to these activities in either equal parts, or at least in that order of precedence. Good teachers gave lectures, conducted seminars and tutorials, looked after their allocation of students, and participated (however reluctantly) in departmental committees and faculty boards. That was in the past.

With the introduction of the (Labour) government’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) all that changed. The emphasis of job descriptions morphed entirely into measurable research and tangible outcomes. We know the result: staff transferred as much teaching as possible onto poorly-paid and inexperienced part-time teachers – usually post-graduate students hoping the experience would give them some advantage in the greasy-pole process of seeking tenure.

Open Source ResearchIt is now not uncommon to hear of staff packing any remaining teaching commitments into one term (or semester) – giving them two-thirds of a year free to do as they wish. At professorial level it’s even worse. At my former university a well-known academic with an international reputation on a six-figure salary taught for two hours once a fortnight, refused to make his email address or his telephone number available to anyone, and lived outside the UK, jetting in for his celebrity seminars every two weeks and returning home the same day.

Nice work if you can get it – all at taxpayers’ expense. The only down side to this system so far at the academics are concerned is that they are under an obligation to write articles and books and get them published. Failure to do so usually means being punished with a heavier teaching load or even worse, with extra departmental duties.

So the system, if it is working properly, means that academic staff members investigate some self-chosen topic of interest in their discipline. They then write articles that are published in academic journals, and any book-length studies are produced by academic or commercial publishing houses. They are given the time to do this work, there is even a system of sabbatical leave (a term, semester, or year off work) and they are paid salaries throughout.

Notwithstanding the nature of such employment codes, the economics of this system warrant further scrutiny. In the case of academic journals it would appear that no money actually changes hands. Academics publish their work with no payment. They do so with the incentive of professional kudos and points added to their RAE ratings. But in fact the publisher charges university and college libraries an enormous amount for subscription to the journal. This is true even in the digital age when more and more publications fail to find their way into print. The recorded number of people who actually read these scholarly articles is truly microscopic. Figures between one and five readers per article are quite common. So the system is expensive and inefficient.

Towards Electronic JournalsIn the case of academic and commercial book publishers the system is a little more murky, but similar principles apply. Most in-house university presses are heavily subsidised, even if they claim to be economically independent of their parent-host. [They commonly do not have to factor in the cost of office and storage space, and maybe not even staff salaries.] Nevertheless, they produce worthy, non-popular works which are sold to an audience of college and university libraries at a huge cost.

Here is a case in point. I have recently reviewed a very good publication of this kind (many are far from good) – a collection of essays on literature and cultural history which retails at the handsome figure of one hundred and twenty pounds. That is more than twenty times the price of a popular classic, and way beyond the book-purchasing budget of most normal human beings.

The authors of this compilation may not be too worried about this state of affairs. They have their academic salaries, they will have received a small sum (or maybe even nothing) for their chapters. Their reward comes from enhanced academic status or an invitation to speak at a conference, the costs of which will be paid by their employer.

Commercial book publishers operate virtually the same system. A very small advance payment on future possible sales will be acceptable for an author whose wages are anyway being paid. If the book sells, the publisher profits far more than the author (who is not primarily motivated by sales income); and if it doesn’t sell, it goes into the slush pile of remaindered titles along with all the many other unsold books. The author can still add this publication to the departmental RAE submission and go on to write more books that don’t sell.

There are two things fundamentally wrong with this state of affairs. One is that public funding is being used and abused, the other is that the whole system of research, its publication and its consumption could be conducted far more efficiently (and at almost zero cost) by using the resources of the Internet.

It is now more than ten years since Steven Harnad published his Subversive Proposal that the results of academic research should be made available via a process of digital ‘self-archiving’ in the form of Web pages. He even thought through the process of peer approval, comments and corrections so that the final product was just as rigorously inspected as a traditional journal article. His main objective at the time was to overcome the terribly laborious process of academic print publishing that can result in delays of up to two years before an article sees light of day. But in fact the same arguments can be made to suggest that research funded by taxpayers money should automatically be put into the public domain. After all, if the public has paid for it, the results should be available to everybody.

Nobody would lose from such a system, and all interested parties would stand to gain in some way. The academic staff member writes a paper and publishes research findings onto a web site – maybe one established by the host university. The content of the paper goes through any peer appraisal and revision process, and then is put into immediate circulation and made available to the public – far more quickly than its print equivalent. The university keeps the public kudos of a ‘contribution to knowledge’; the author is likely to have far more readers and more feedback; and the public has access to work that it has paid for.

Of course there may be special cases. Some science departments have financial partnerships with commercial and industrial companies which involve copyright, patents, and intellectual property rights issues. This is another example of taxpayers subsidising commercial interests, but these might reasonably be excluded from such schemes. But the vast majority of research is carried out in subjects with little or no commercial value at all. It lies unread, unloved, and ignored, buried far out of sight in departmental archives and library vaults.

Doctorow - Content - book jacketThere isn’t even any reason why those with a saleable product shouldn’t publish in print as well as digitally. If an article of a book-length study proves popular in its Web space, that is a compelling endorsement so far as print publishers are concerned. And the arguments regarding free online access versus for sale in print are now well known. Making something available free on line enhances the chance of people buying the same thing in printed format, especially in minority interest and specialist subjects.

So – just as any information gathered by a government should be made available free of charge to the public (population statistics, government spending figures, Ordnance Survey maps) the results of research conducted in publicly-funded universities should be available to the people who pay for it through their taxes. In fact whilst they’re at it, I can’t think of any reason why universities shouldn’t publish their course syllabuses and teaching materials as well – can you?

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: Media, Open Sources, Publishing Tagged With: Academic writing, Education, Open Source Research, Open Sources, Publishing

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