ALICE WASS
Exploring Media

02/02/2018

Lupton’s ‘New Hybrid Beings’ explores the social, cultural and political theory which affects the understanding and meaning of self-tracking cultures. Key areas include: sociomaterial perspectives, lively data, selfhood, neoliberal politics, cultural dimensions of embodiment, datafication, dataveillance and privacy.

09/02/2018

‘Postdigital Space’ explores different spaces and places. This topic is debated between theorists. The first argument is posed by Heidegger (see ‘Introducing Heidegger A Graphic Guide’ 2010), who believes that space is meaningless, whereas place has a purpose and therefore a transformation occurs, once space has meaning it becomes a place. Creswell’s opposing view says: “People do things in place. What they do, in part, is responsible for the meanings that a place might have” (2009: 2). A set of values which are designed and collected and agreed upon about how a space is used, turns it into a place. 

16/02/2018

The ‘Postdigtial Aesthetic’ topic explored new ways of seeing. This is important as humans see before they read, for example: babies understand facial expressions and emotions before they learn to read and write. Aesthetic is used to describe the essence of an object. In our postdigital society it means that we change as our technology changes. This links into ‘The work of art in the age of digital reproduction’ by Bertman Bruce (2000). Exploring how reproduction of art has not only changed the aesthetic experience of art but also art’s political functions, value, and our social relations constructed around it. The most perfect reproduction of a piece of artwork lacks one key element, its presence in time and space.

23/02/2018

This week’s topic was given by guest speaker Dr. William Brown, who is a Senior Lecture in Film at Roehampton University. The majority of the lecture was a screening of his 2014 film called, ‘Selfie’. The film explores how the image virus took control of the nineteenth century, and how in the twentieth century the grip of the image virus has increased. Now, in the twenty first century the image virus has begun to run rampant throughout humanity, and it explores the effect that this is having on our society. 

16/03/2018

This week’s topic of ‘Postdigital Economy’, explored the meaning of value. Economy is the understanding of value and the trust which is related to value. Postdigital Economy is the awareness of the digital economy; this idea is explored in depth in David Sax’s book ‘The Revenge of Analog’ (2016). Sax explains that as digital technology plays an increasingly large role in our lives, it caused a postdigital economy to emerge, this emerging postdigital economy looks towards the future of technology, without forgetting its past.

09/03/2018

This week’s topic of ‘Postdigital Emotions’, explored the phenomenological perspective of how we understand emotions. We understand emotions through events and experiences and how we react to these experiences. Kant explained that just because an emotion comes from an experience it does not mean you have to be physically present as you could be affected though images or videos. There are three main emotional states: affect, emotional labour and immersion.