Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
Proposal
Sorry, forgot to post this last week when I finished it.
When I first began looking into Digital Democracy as a theme, I wanted to get down to how it really functions. What impact does the massive snowball increase in technology have on the ways we live our lives? Some of the basic questions surrounding technology involve our adaptation of it into our lives: communication, transportation, information, etc. However, the role which technology has taken in our interpersonal relations is one of the things that I was most interested in investigating.
For example, how does the use of the internet change our systems of behavior and interaction? I want to examine how our connections, primarily via the technology generated from the internet and computers, have changed when translated to the digital sphere. Social networking sites, online gaming, chat and fan sites: all of these things exist uniquely within our perception of the internet, and they each have their own codes of behavior. How does democracy adapt and exist within that shift?
My goal is to work with screen capture technology to create some mini-videos and still frames, along with my own narration, to look at these sorts of internet “meeting places” and find out how all of this has changed and developed. I’d like to investigate primarily the worlds of social networking (primarily via Facebook and Myspace), massively multiplayer online role playing games (by looking at posted videos of World of Warcraft and/or Halo), and the fan sites/discussion boards that have sprung up across the internet (mostly through some of the Harry Potter and Wheel of Time fan groups, along with a hefty dose of IMDB).
I would like to look at the communication processes between people in these various spheres of internet influence, and determine what role that digital influence has had. The various types of slang and acronyms that have sprung up are a great introductory example of what I am planning to look at; the world where these sorts of things exist isn’t exactly the one we are generally thought to inhabit on a day-to-day basis. The internet is a whole different world, to many users, and I want to pick at that phenomenon and look at how and why it works. Common practices here in the “real world” have an established precedent, and by attempting to remediate the original websites and information through my mini-video project, I’m hoping to hypermediate the whole thing in such a way as to look past the conventions we’ve come to take for granted when dealing with the internet.
In the end, the goal here is to examine the internet through a secondary lens of technology. By going in and looking at how behavior is determined as “OK” or “unacceptable”, I want to get back to the first conventions most of us ever dealt with when interacting with other people online. By utilizing different areas of contact between groups (n.b. the vast differences between Facebook and World of Warcraft), I am going to put us back into a learning frame of mind. And, hopefully, by observing that initial interaction, I’ll be able to use that to show the development of a digital democracy between users.
When I first began looking into Digital Democracy as a theme, I wanted to get down to how it really functions. What impact does the massive snowball increase in technology have on the ways we live our lives? Some of the basic questions surrounding technology involve our adaptation of it into our lives: communication, transportation, information, etc. However, the role which technology has taken in our interpersonal relations is one of the things that I was most interested in investigating.
For example, how does the use of the internet change our systems of behavior and interaction? I want to examine how our connections, primarily via the technology generated from the internet and computers, have changed when translated to the digital sphere. Social networking sites, online gaming, chat and fan sites: all of these things exist uniquely within our perception of the internet, and they each have their own codes of behavior. How does democracy adapt and exist within that shift?
My goal is to work with screen capture technology to create some mini-videos and still frames, along with my own narration, to look at these sorts of internet “meeting places” and find out how all of this has changed and developed. I’d like to investigate primarily the worlds of social networking (primarily via Facebook and Myspace), massively multiplayer online role playing games (by looking at posted videos of World of Warcraft and/or Halo), and the fan sites/discussion boards that have sprung up across the internet (mostly through some of the Harry Potter and Wheel of Time fan groups, along with a hefty dose of IMDB).
I would like to look at the communication processes between people in these various spheres of internet influence, and determine what role that digital influence has had. The various types of slang and acronyms that have sprung up are a great introductory example of what I am planning to look at; the world where these sorts of things exist isn’t exactly the one we are generally thought to inhabit on a day-to-day basis. The internet is a whole different world, to many users, and I want to pick at that phenomenon and look at how and why it works. Common practices here in the “real world” have an established precedent, and by attempting to remediate the original websites and information through my mini-video project, I’m hoping to hypermediate the whole thing in such a way as to look past the conventions we’ve come to take for granted when dealing with the internet.
In the end, the goal here is to examine the internet through a secondary lens of technology. By going in and looking at how behavior is determined as “OK” or “unacceptable”, I want to get back to the first conventions most of us ever dealt with when interacting with other people online. By utilizing different areas of contact between groups (n.b. the vast differences between Facebook and World of Warcraft), I am going to put us back into a learning frame of mind. And, hopefully, by observing that initial interaction, I’ll be able to use that to show the development of a digital democracy between users.
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