def. Combining media memes together to form a new memetic piece of media
This is an experimental work where I combine three versions of the song Heartbeats by Jose Gonzales with the advertising meme of the bouncing Sony balls intercut with characters from Halo 3 repeating the same movements.
Will we ever get to a point where we’ll be used to reading media this way?
The Aesthetic Poetic and myself have been talking a lot about how the larger Internet community perceive us and the content we produce.
Wordle is a great visualization tool that helps in this quest as in scraps URLs for keywords then visualizes them. This word cloud can be seen as a visualization of how I am being perceived over at JamesChutter.com
The redundant and copious nature of social media stories is obvious even to the most casual social media audience. In an oral tradition stories would have to be repeated in order to reinforce what was just said. There was not the opportunity to flip back a few pages or rewind to regain the thread of a story. Orators would reiterate and reinforce to help their audience to follow the story. Again even with all the powers of the Internet and computers to archive we still have a huge amount of redundancy in our storytelling. YouTube, the most popular of social media video sharing sites, has a copious amount of stories. One of the main keys to YouTube’s success is that next to the current video story that the audience is watching, the audience has a selection of related videos. These related videos add to the redundancy of the story, which adds to ability to remember, which adds to the ability to keep the story alive. In the YouTube world stories are kept alive by posting video responses. This adds again a redundant step but also adds to the interlocution of storytelling that was lost in mono-directional media such as the novel or radio or all high-definition hot media as McLuhan would so label them.
In an Internet age with mass media saturation reaching epic proportions we as a society are inundated with information. The retention of this massive amount of information is a problem now as it was in an oral tradition. In an oral culture stories had to be remembered in ones own brain, there was not a textual form of archiving. In order to facilitate the memorization of stories, stories were aggregated but not analyzed. Continual analysis would confuse the stories making it more difficult to remember.Aggregation is one of the most notable evolutions of the second generation of the Internet. This aggregation really took off with AJAX technology. Where once a computer-user would wake up in the morning and open a separate url page for a national newspaper, a local newspaper, local weather, local sports team update, an online shop, it is now possible thru Real Simple Syndication (RSS) to have the exact same information and much more all housed on a single url page. Katherine Hayleswould see this as giving a piece of ourselves over to the computer an example of becoming Post-Human, but even with the endless archiving abilities of the Internet we still rely on the memory function housed in our brain just like our ancestors of the oral tradition. The AJAX RSS aggregation of sites like Netvibes or PopURLS help keep the story straight of information we want to receive and facilitate memory in order for us to tell the story over the water-cooler of last night’s game or the weather forecast. This technology helps our human memory but does not facilitate any analysis of this information. It may aggregate the syndicated feed of disparate stories onto the same webpage, but that is where the connection making ends. Daily stories are constantly being updated to these pages but never analyzed.
