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Many of these specific possibilities have contributed to a reappraisal of the artist/audience relationship and the notion of authorship itself. Common features of Internet Art, such as interactivity, collaboration and the opportunity to remain anonymous behind a veil of multiple selves or avatars, have also led many artists to question not only the nature of the art object but also that of personal identity.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens aujourd’hui à 21h46 How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003. www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
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The Contexts of Online Communication
The context in which an interaction occurs has a profound effect on communication. In facetoface encounters, factors ranging from psychological to environmental to cultural all have an effect on how the message is transmitted and how it is understood. Online communication is no less subject to context, and may bring with it additional contextual issues that will have an effect on the intended message.
The type of technology being used to facilitate the interaction, for example, has a bearing on the environmental context of the conversation. A conversation taking place through instant messaging in between meetings will have a different flavor than if the same topic were discussed in a virtual world, on the phone, or in an online meeting room.
The challenge of any communication, that of being understood, exists online as much as— maybe more so than—offline. Posts on threaded discussion forums and instant message communications are notoriously hard to decode correctly because of the lack of nuance. As more people participate in these kinds of communications, signals that were developed to add context to text-based messages, like smileys (☺) and tags (like ), are slipping into the mainstream. The issue of context is far from solved, though, and continues to surface with each new mode of communication that emerges.
New avenues of interaction. Online communication channels reduce the distance between people and allow interactions to happen more quickly than they might otherwise.
Communication with distant colleagues, relatives and friends is shortened from weeks to minutes and can even be instant, allowing us to maintain stronger ties to a wider group of people than ever before. At the same time, tools like Facebook and LinkedIn help to relieve the additional social burden of these ties by making it easy to keep track of contacts and keep a record of when we last “touched” them.
Online forms of communication also incorporate modes of contact missing from more traditional means of interaction at a distance. Communications that would once have been text-only or voice-only are now much richer, weaving together text, voice, body language, and even shared experiences. Many of us are still learning how to process these cues while receiving and transmitting them through the medium of a computer, a challenge that can make effective communication difficult; but for many young people, for whom these technologies have always existed, interpreting and interacting this way is already second nature. Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of online communication channels is that they are not exclusive. It’s possible to create a blog post, Twitter about it, send an instant message to a colleague and get on a Skype call with someone else almost at the same time. Moving back and forth between these and other channels is quick and easy. The choice of medium depends on the person (or people) we want to reach, the length and nature of the message, and the amount of time we want to spend in the interaction; but the ability to flow between them is becoming more seamless by the day. The ease of transitioning from one to the other technologically can be at odds with the desire for a deep, sustained interaction.
Commentaire posté par The New Media Consortium, aujourd’hui à 21h58 Social Networking, the “Third Place” and the evolution of communication, 2007. www.nmc.org/pdf/Evolution-of-Communication.pdf
- The construction of the ghost-like avatar.
One way in which these ideals have been put into practice is through contributing to the construction of multiple selves and avatars. Investigations into the Internet and its effect on society have identified a major paradox at its heart; the Net is seen as both an agent of social alienation and the harbinger of a new sense of global community. For this reason Jean Baudrillard can describe the modern citizen as living a monadic existence inside « an archaic, closed off cell, » connected to the outside world via the telephone, the radio and television, and more recently the Internet. Heavy Internet users are often portrayed in the media as damaged individuals who have lost (or have never gained) the ability to interact properly with others. This monadic nature, however, masks the computer’s communicative possibilities. This point is exhaustively explored by American psychologist Sherry Turkle in her work on the effects of the Internet on our sense of personal identity. Turkle employs the metaphor of Microsoft’s « Windows » to describe how email, Internet chat rooms and Multi-User Domains (or MUDs) have afforded individuals with the opportunity to construct multiple selves. Real Life, she explains, is just another window, and it is often one that her subjects keep minimized in favour of exploring Internet relationships. This environment, Turkle argues, becomes a laboratory for the construction of self, and artists using the Net have used personal identity in a similar way as just another creative material to work with.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens aujourd’hui à 22h03 How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003. www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
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Many of these specific possibilities have contributed to a reappraisal of the artist/audience relationship and the notion of authorship itself. Common features of Internet Art, such as interactivity, collaboration and the opportunity to remain anonymous behind a veil of multiple selves or avatars, have also led many artists to question not only the nature of the art object but also that of personal identity.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens aujourd’hui à 21h46
How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003.
www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
-
The Contexts of Online Communication
The context in which an interaction occurs has a profound effect on communication. In facetoface encounters, factors ranging from psychological to environmental to cultural all have an effect on how the message is transmitted and how it is understood. Online communication is no less subject to context, and may bring with it additional contextual issues that will have an effect on the intended message.
The type of technology being used to facilitate the interaction, for example, has a bearing on the environmental context of the conversation. A conversation taking place through instant messaging in between meetings will have a different flavor than if the same topic were discussed in a virtual world, on the phone, or in an online meeting room.
The challenge of any communication, that of being understood, exists online as much as— maybe more so than—offline. Posts on threaded discussion forums and instant message communications are notoriously hard to decode correctly because of the lack of nuance. As more people participate in these kinds of communications, signals that were developed to add context to text-based messages, like smileys (☺) and tags (like ), are slipping into the mainstream. The issue of context is far from solved, though, and continues to surface with each new mode of communication that emerges.
New avenues of interaction. Online communication channels reduce the distance between people and allow interactions to happen more quickly than they might otherwise.
Communication with distant colleagues, relatives and friends is shortened from weeks to minutes and can even be instant, allowing us to maintain stronger ties to a wider group of people than ever before. At the same time, tools like Facebook and LinkedIn help to relieve the additional social burden of these ties by making it easy to keep track of contacts and keep a record of when we last “touched” them.
Online forms of communication also incorporate modes of contact missing from more traditional means of interaction at a distance. Communications that would once have been text-only or voice-only are now much richer, weaving together text, voice, body language, and even shared experiences. Many of us are still learning how to process these cues while receiving and transmitting them through the medium of a computer, a challenge that can make effective communication difficult; but for many young people, for whom these technologies have always existed, interpreting and interacting this way is already second nature. Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of online communication channels is that they are not exclusive. It’s possible to create a blog post, Twitter about it, send an instant message to a colleague and get on a Skype call with someone else almost at the same time. Moving back and forth between these and other channels is quick and easy. The choice of medium depends on the person (or people) we want to reach, the length and nature of the message, and the amount of time we want to spend in the interaction; but the ability to flow between them is becoming more seamless by the day. The ease of transitioning from one to the other technologically can be at odds with the desire for a deep, sustained interaction.
Commentaire posté par The New Media Consortium, aujourd’hui à 21h58
Social Networking, the “Third Place” and the evolution of communication, 2007.
www.nmc.org/pdf/Evolution-of-Communication.pdf
-
The construction of the ghost-like avatar.
One way in which these ideals have been put into practice is through contributing to the construction of multiple selves and avatars. Investigations into the Internet and its effect on society have identified a major paradox at its heart; the Net is seen as both an agent of social alienation and the harbinger of a new sense of global community. For this reason Jean Baudrillard can describe the modern citizen as living a monadic existence inside « an archaic, closed off cell, » connected to the outside world via the telephone, the radio and television, and more recently the Internet. Heavy Internet users are often portrayed in the media as damaged individuals who have lost (or have never gained) the ability to interact properly with others. This monadic nature, however, masks the computer’s communicative possibilities. This point is exhaustively explored by American psychologist Sherry Turkle in her work on the effects of the Internet on our sense of personal identity. Turkle employs the metaphor of Microsoft’s « Windows » to describe how email, Internet chat rooms and Multi-User Domains (or MUDs) have afforded individuals with the opportunity to construct multiple selves. Real Life, she explains, is just another window, and it is often one that her subjects keep minimized in favour of exploring Internet relationships. This environment, Turkle argues, becomes a laboratory for the construction of self, and artists using the Net have used personal identity in a similar way as just another creative material to work with.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens aujourd’hui à 22h03
How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003.
www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm