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?
In an earlier post I lamented the fact that within the computer and net space that things are meant to work properly. We don’t like it when our computer doesn’t work as expected or that a link is broken, however it is these flaws that make art so interesting. The same goes for storytelling. It is the imperfections in life that are so interesting to share through story. Can you imagine a world where everything worked? What a boring life we’d live.
Ben Okri puts it so much better than me:
“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”
I’m worried that as a society we are focusing way too much energy on perfection without sharing our imperfections.
As Walter J. Ong tells us in his book Orality and Literacy,”oral societies live very much in the present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.” This is as true now as it was in an oral tradition. The format of blogging is set up to push stories down the webpage visually as new stories are published. These stories are archived but in a visual hierarchy they are seen as lesser to more recent posts. As aggregator sites collect stories they often automatically refresh and cull in more recent stories thus “sloughing off” the older stories. The algorithim of Digg.com, one of the more popular story aggregators is such that stories that are ‘digged’ by readers or in other words rated highly are shown more on the landing page, but the time of publication is also factored in to show highest rated and most recent. There are social booking sites such as del.icio.us that serve as online tools for bookmarking or remembering stories however the greatest value of these sites is for sharing of stories that are important to the individual. For example, del.icio.us/radarddb tells my audience stories that are important to me at my workplace, but always displayed in chronological order with the visual hierarchy being that of most recent at the top. In a social media landscape that perpetuates new stories being published every second, stories that are not memorable are in the past and likely to be forgotten.
Walter Ong separates these into two separate points, however as they relate to social media in the same way I’ll group them together. In an oral tradition the audience is known and the audience is human. It is humans in dialogue with other humans in a live physical space. This is very different from the unknown audience of a book or the abstract world that many films present. Social media abides by the same principles of human-to-human interaction, albeit through technological mediation. This is a main reason that Second Life will only be seen as a blip on the Web 2.0 radar in years to come. Humans are being asked to relate to each in an interface that is a mere simulation of a lifeworld, with the abstraction of avatars. Second Life will remain for an elite crowd of computer users who feel most comfortable interacting in an abstraction of reality. This does not hold true for the majority of broadband users.
That being said the gaming industry has been saved by the advent of Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). MMORPGs took the convention of gaming, which was not of a real lifeworld and was situationality abstract and infused a human element by allowing users to play and communicate with each other worldwide over a broadband connection. Users started to create new forms of storytelling in a social media language over these broadband connections. Machinima, one such emergent form of storytelling, was born out of a filmic electronic age but operates in the language of social media storytelling. Over the broadband connection users control video game characters to act out small short films. These films are recorded to a hard drive from which the footage is edited, scored and ultimately produced in a similar tradition to digital filmmaking. The most popular of these films is the series Red vs. Blue where the soldiers of Halo, controlled and voiced by a group of gamers, simply pontificate on life, a departure from the narrative of the original video game which included the abstract narrative of saving the world from alien invasion.
Another example of apply to new concreteness to un-situational and abstract form of storytelling is Alternate Reality Games or ARGs. One such example is the promotional ARG for the film The Bourne Supremacy where contestants are given clues online to the physical location in their home city to more clue in order to solve part of the mystery that takes place in the film. Another example of cross-platforming, but also a clear indication of infusing a situational element to an otherwise abstract story of a super agent trained to kill by an unknown government body.
In an oral culture the tradition of verbal jousting remains still to this day where an orator verbally challenges his audience sometimes in an intellectual debate or simply in vilifying ones mother. This language of combat is again evidenced in most forums and chat rooms, so much so, that moderators are often put in place to monitor the litany of barbed insults. Even in a relatively tame forum such as a computer repair forum, users often call out other users lack of knowledge on the particular topic. Often the original question is lost to the combat of users. Visit a Sci-Fi forum where the users are experienced chat room users and the forked tongues are everywhere. This is seen less in print and electronic storytelling because the audience is unknown and there is no immediate response. Insulting someone’s mother in a novel loses it’s impact when the novel takes years to write, years to be release and months to read. This should not be seen as childish immature behavior but rather a return to antiquity. So get out there and craft a yo momma diss to the next forum user who rubs you the wrong way in support of the return to orality.
This interaction of orator and audience that is essential to oral storytelling is again resurfacing in the participatory nature of social media. The ability to chat online through forums and message boards was one of the founding functionalities of the Internet long before Web 2.0 was coined, but this was reserved for serious computer users and early adopters. It has not been until recently that the net of social participatory engagement has widened. This is best seen on customer review sites. Brand are used to telling their story or their product messaging through print ads, radio spots, television commercials and website homepages, but as more communities grow online the trust is put into the audience or consumer not the orator or brand. In this case the story has to change and adapt to audience participation. However, this new form of audience participation in brand storytelling has not been without its learning curve. Chevrolet introduced a viral campaign effort that asked consumers to insert their own slogan for the next Chevy Tahoe campaign. Copy that read, “our planet’s oil is almost gone, you don’t need GPS to see where this road leads,” and “like this snowy wilderness? Better get your fill of it now, then say hello to global warming,” was not Chevy’s ideal brand story but it did give them an insight into how consumers saw their brand.
Brands now have to been empathetic and participatory with their consumers, gone are the days of being objectively distant and telling consumers what they want. The whole nature of social based media is an interactive participatory conversation, a sharp departure for traditional media storytellers.
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 direct relation to Ong’s redundant characteristic comes his classification of the oral tradition being conservative or traditionalist. The word conservative or traditional has not normally been associated with emerging social media, but Ong uses these words in a slightly different way than their normal associated meaning. In an oral tradition once the story was uttered it was only archived by memory. This culture put highest value on the “wise old man” that could conserve the stories of his tribe. In order to make it easier to conserve the stories the stories were more traditional and didn’t invite intellectual experimentation. Without the luxury of recording stories, the stories needed to remain simple and easily retold. Although in a social media space we do have the ability to record and archive, the most successful stories are still the ones that are most easily retold. This is the foundation for virality. Stories that are easiest to spread are the most viral. Hence stories tend to be short, reliant on classic tropes without a high degree of intellectual experimentation.Who are the ‘wise old men’ in the social media space? Again it is the person that can aggregate and conserve who are the tribal leaders of the social media space. When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp acquired the social network, Myspace he was able to conserve a multitude of interpersonal, brand and media stories under the heading of his electronic age media company, adding a new participatory element to his media offering.
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.
This is Ong’s most technical defining characteristic which relies heavily on its juxtaposing to the written word. In the written textual world an additive sentence would contain many conjoining words such as “and.” The example Ong uses is from an early manuscript of the Bible, which was conscribed from a 1610 oral delivery:
“In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made. And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning day.”
This passage would make any contemporary writing teacher shudder with its excessive reliance on the word ‘and’, not to mention its lack of poetry. However Joel Sherzerin Exploration in the Ethnography of Speaking points out that in an oral tradition the orator was most concerned with convenience of the delivery of the oration. In our literate culture this is sharply contrasted with Talmy Givon’s analysis of textual semantics, which favors organization and linguistic structure as evidenced by the same Biblical passage from the New American Bible’s translation from 1970.
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’. Thus evening came, and morning followed – the first day.”
Comparing early editions of the Bible to micro-blogging and mashups might initially seem a stretch, however in this context of additive oration there are many similarities.Micro-blogging is an evolution of a blog or weblog that is usually confined to under 140 characters of textual writing making it easy to update and receive on a mobile device through short messaging service (SMS). The writing is often in answer to a question such as “what are you doing?” as is the case of one of the most popular micro-blog platforms Twitter. Updates to the micro blog are archived in additive fashion with no reverence for any linguistic structure. This is an example of a twitter story that I follow that a co-worker of mine publishes. It is his life story syndicated publicly, and time stamped sequentially. It is simply his daily life story; entertaining, educational, and an opportunity for building community through interlocution. Unlike most textual and electronic stories it has no clear, beginning, middle or end. There is no prescribed character arc, act structure or organizational hierarchy. It is simple additive pieces of information followed, by another, followed by another, which is also a trait of the mash-up.
The mashup although being nothing new, having being born out of collage, and appropriation works is an example of a genre of storytelling made possible by an emerging social media language. With social integration into the Internet came the sharing of media across community lines. Communities of people would come together and share common interests. Myspace for example is a social network that was created to bring communities together around the commonality of a musical act. This assembly of like-minded music aficionados helped facilitate the musical iteration of the mash-up. DJs, music produces or anyone with consumer audio software could take shared audio files and digitally ‘mash’ them together to create their own song or their own story in a social media language. Most notably, DJ Diplo who champions bands from around the world by mashing-up their music. M.I.A a London MC, a Tamil of Jaffna origin, was Diplo’s first find along with the Brazilian band Bonde Do Role. His mashing up in an addititive fashion of their music did not follow the more literal forms of pop-music production although their music thanks to Diplo’s story offering has shot MIA and Bondo Role to musical fame. Diplo often mashs Baile Funk a niche genre from the favelas of Brazil with contemporary classics helping to solidify older music in our societal memory while also injecting new elements to his musical story.
In legendary DJ Pete Tong’s the BBC Essential Mix he calls Diplo the “cut and paste King,” a title which arguably could be shared with Girl Talk another mash-up artist. In keeping with the oral tradition Girl Talk can be seen as a contemporary rhapsode as he “sews” together songs in an improvised fashion much like a rhasode would weave together myths, poems, and jokes depending on the audience. Although DJing or live musically improvisation is not inherent to the social media landscape it is the social integration into the internet that allows for the stories of music to be more easily shared across musical tribal lines so that the Rhapsode, DJ, or Mash-Up artist can tell a new tale using the additive oral tradition of language.
