Intro to Emerging Media

In Summer 1999, I was working as a graphic design intern in McGraw-Hill Higher Education in Dubuque, Iowa. My job was to design college textbook covers for the subjects of geology, anatomy, physiology, biology, science, and education. The art director and the author required three different design concepts and compositions of each book cover I designed for their review. Therefore, professional stock photography played an important role on the book covers as well as in my internship.

During that time, there were several famous stock photography companies such as The Image Bank, Tony Stone, FPG, Allstock and SuperStock providing the high quality royalty-free or rights-managed images to the graphic design, publishing, and advertising industries. Customers were able to search stock images in three different ways: (1) looking up from the quarterly, bi-annually, or annually printed catalogs; (2) browsing from the image CD-Roms; (3) calling the stock photography sales representatives to place the image requests. Since the subject matters of the book covers in my internship were all about human bodies, animals, nature, and people, very few selections were listed in the printed catalogs and CD-Roms. Mostly, I would call the sales representatives and list my photo criteria – copyright, usage, book cover size, color options, subject matter appearing on the photos (nature, human, or animal), photo style, etc. They would select the photos based on their professional perspectives and of their company’s image library, and mailed tens and hundreds of positive films to my office in a day or two. I would look at all the films on the lightbox, pick three suitable ones, scan them in Photoshop and start designing the book covers. The unused films had to be returned in three days to a week under the agency policies because other customers might request similar photos. Once one of the three covers had been chosen by the editor and the art director, I could get the pricing from the sales rep and purchased the photo. A rights-managed photo on a 9″x11″ textbook cover at the time would run around $3000-$4000. Unfortunately, if none of the photos worked, or the editor and art director disliked the photos, I would have to place another request from the same agency or contact different one to request more photos, and go through the same process again. The experience could be very painful.


10 years ago, online stock photography business did not exist. Many designers and companies relied on printed catalogs, image CD-Roms and stock photo agencies to provide them photos. We all treated this business like a profession. We assumed and treated the people behind the scenes as professionals. The photographers were professional because we did not have the budget, schedule, ability and knowledge to shoot the Grand Canyon rock layers, or wildlife in a natural environment. We could not afford to buy the SLR camera and shoot the photos in films. The catalog and CD-Rom publishers were professional. We assumed that the photo selections listed in the catalogs or CD-Roms were the best and most popular, often though, we knew the fact that printed catalogs were only updated a couple of times a year, and CD-Roms a few times while the image libraries were updated monthly. The reason was that the photo editing and production time of printed catalogs could take at least six months, plus the printing and paper could be very costly to update frequently. Editors had to guess at trends for when the books would be in the market, often six months to a year ahead of time. With all the limitations of printed catalogs or CD-Roms, it was obvious to see why the same photo was being used many times by many other customers. Yet, we were still willing to get stuck in the professional stock photography agencies. The stock photography sales reps were professional because we trusted their professional views and knowledge to pick the best photos to fulfill our needs. We all waited for the agencies to feed us whatever photos they had in their collections. We were very passive at one point.

Professionals become gatekeepers, simultaneously providing and controlling access to information, entertainment, communication, or other ephemeral goods (Shirky 57).

However, the problem we encountered on the inside was that not all sales reps and editors were equal in terms of working experience, image choice or sensitivity to market trends. It might involve personal preferences or taste rather than professional selections. So as many good ones there were, there were probably just as many that did not provide the best level of service but still functioned as gatekeepers. If the quality of gatekeepers was varied, the level of professionals would be fluctuated too.


I still remembered a water droplet stock photo that I had seen thousands of times in those stock photo catalogs, in the packaging of eye-drops, in the newspaper, in the magazine ads, and in my classmate’s portfolios which definitely made me sick. A lot of times, if a full page of water-drop photos were published in one catalog, other stock agencies would follow and print a full page of water droplet photos in their catalog as well. Same thing for other photo concepts, for example, hands holding soil and computer mouse were abusively used at one point. Every agency was publishing similar photo selections and competing with each other. Every agency was each other’s market watch. It was obvious that the decision of publishing those photos were controlled by market demands and sales and marketing manager than professional photographers. Therefore, in my opinion, the professionals were not gatekeepers, but the sales managers were. Although I was a graphic design student in a creative field, the environment was very limited to be creative when it came to the usage of stock photography. Could professional photographers provide more professional photographs than water droplet? Whom defined who was professional, and who was not? Would the sales manager really control the stock photography industry? If the professionals caused me to be tired of using their photographs, why would I still call them professional?



The situation had improved a lot after I graduated and worked in the website design field. In the year of 2001, my stock photography shopping experience entered a new era. The professional photographers could show their stock photos online and get more exposure to the public. Instead of calling the agencies to choose photos at the office, I started searching images online at Getty Images (www.GettyImages.com) and Corbis (www.CorbisImages.com). The printed catalog and CD-Roms were fading out from the market. The online catalogs showed the most recent images daily. Phone calls to the sales representatives were unnecessary, so the sales position was fading out. I could freely enter keywords in the search engine and browsed as many stock photos as I wanted without having to talk to anyone. Sales and marketing managers had less or no control on what I searched although they could still promote high sales pitch photos in the homepage. The potential stock photos could be saved in the lightbox under the company’s account. The image prices dropped to a few husband dollars and were being listed clearly in the website. It was hassle-free to call for quotations. Online payments were acceptable. The newly, convenient shopping experiences were more respected by the customers more than ever as we enjoyed direct access rather than being controlled.

When reproduction, distribution, and categorization were all difficult, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed professionals to undertake those jobs, and we properly venerated those people for the service they performed. Now those tasks are simpler, and the earlier roles have in many cases become optional, and are sometimes obstacles to direct access, often putting the providers of the older service at odds with their erstwhile patrons” (Shirky 78).

Getty Images and Corbis were early leaders and have been respected once, but the compliment did not last very long. The same old cycle came back. After a few years of using the same old stock photography sites, I found them annoying once again because there was not any more new, exciting collections released from their professional photographers. The photo prices were still high; an image could cost a few hundreds to a few thousands dollars. Jimmy Ball, a friend of mine who was working at The Image Bank back in the 90s explained that professional photographers originally submitted outtakes or seconds to stock houses. Later on, they started shooting their own collections for stocks as one of their income sources. The stock photos would reflect different styles and tastes of different photographers which might not match the agencies’ style. Eventually, the agencies started art directing the photographers to get the right looks. The marketing managers might be the one who provided the data of marketing research and the market needs. In other words, the sales and marketing managers were controlling the online stock photography again.



Although Getty Images and Corbis were leading the stock photography industries, there were many new smaller agencies that looked at their collections and tried to find their niche markets from there. They produced what the leaders did not do. One of them was iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com) which was founded by Bruce Livingstone in May, 2000. It provided free stock images for the market, and started charging photos for as low as $1 in 2001. In 2006, iStockphoto was acquired by Getty Images. Another free stock photography agency was called SXC (http://www.sxc.hu) found by Peter Hamza in 2001. It was an user-generated content online stock photo agencies where users could contribute and download images and illustrations at no charge. In 2009, SXC became a subsidiary of Getty Images due to its parent company, Jupiterimages, which was sold to Getty Images. Now iStockphoto and SXC are tied in together. The advantage of both sites is that they are both based on user-generated photographers rather than only professional photographers. Although both still have moral restrictions for the contributors and must undergo portfolio review if contributing to iStockphoto, the stock photography industry has made a big step to another level. I can find some free or low price (range from $1 to $27) stock photographs with similar quality as those of hundreds of dollars for design projects. Shirky quoted what the UCLA sociologist James Q. Wilson wrote in his magisterial Bureaucracy:

A professional is someone who receives important occupational rewards from a reference group whose membership is limited to people who have undergone specialized formal education and have accepted a group-defined code of proper conduct. (58)

Although I do not know if the photographers who contribute to iStockphoto or SXC are professionally trained in school or if they treat photography a hobby, I still appreciate their efforts in sharing their talents to the stock photography community. Especially with the advanced digital SLR camera technology, everybody can train oneself to be a professional.

Works Cited

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin HC, The, 2008. Print.

“IStockphoto -.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Web. 10 Dec. 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istockphoto.

“Stock.xchng -.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Web. 10 Dec. 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock.xchng.

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I was looking up my uploaded videos under my YouTube account tonight. There was a box called Recommended for you featuring some old videos of a Hong Kong celebrity, Mary Jean Reimer (翁靜晶). It reminded me her dramatic marriage with her husband who was 30 years older, her career change from an actress to an attorney, and the affairs with her boss who was killed by falling from her apartment in a high-rise building when he was trying to escape before the husband entering the apartment. Her background triggered me to go deeper about her, so I just googled her Chinese name 翁靜晶. The first thing listed in the search, besides the image results, was a Wikipedia page about her.

Then I was asking myself how much I knew American celebrities because I usually didn’t pay much attention on the American entertainment news. I thought I should at least look up what has been the hottest celebrity news lately at People.com. The first in the Top Five Most Read Stories This Week list was “Source: Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal Split” published at at 2:45 PM Eastern Time, November 29, 2009. Then I did another Google search. Entertainment News site in Australia news.com.au, msnbc, The Huffington Post, I’m Not Obsessed! – a celebrity gossip blog, Digital Spy, and everywhere around the world have been reporting their split.

Although I have recognized the faces of Witherspoon and Gyllenhaal from the movies, my curiosity still drove me to search more about their split and the backgrounds of both Hollywood stars at Wikipedia. Surprisingly, Jake Gyllenhaal’s profile has been updated at 19:59, November 30, 2009, and Reese Witherspoon at 00:47, November 10, 2009. The Wikipedian even recorded their early lives, education, marriage, separation and divorce, besides their professional lives. However, I knew nothing about Gyllenhaal and Witherspoon, except their faces as I wasn’t born and raised in this culture, how did I determine all the information listed in Wikipedia was correct?

Has anyone noticed Wikipedia’s tagline:



Wikipedia encouraged the members or non-members to protect their shared knowledge and information like treasure.

In The Future Of The Internet And How To Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain wrote:

“network participants can be trusted, and indeed that they will be participants rather than customers, infuses the Internet’s design at nearly every level. Anyone can become part of the network so long as any existing member of the network is ready to share access. And once someone is on the network, the network’s design is intended to allow all data to be treated the same way: it can be sent from anyone to anyone, and it can be in support of any application developed by an outsider.” (p.32)

Then I clicked on “EDIT” in Reese Witherspoon’s page, a message box at the top reminded me:



If I edit the page without logging in, my IP address will be published publicly in history page. “IP addresses are attached to computers, and domain names to IP address.” (p.217) That means if one who put untruthful information without identifying oneself, and one’s location can be tracked easily. That is probably why Zittrain said that we can trust our neighbors.

“There are lots of reasons for a network to be built to identify the people using it, rather than just the machines found on it.” (p.32)

Althought Wikipedia, unlike CompuServe and AOL, didn’t set rule of “no ID, no network access” (p.32) to the contributors, publicizing the non-member’s IP address implied that no ID is with ID. Contributors can choose to post their IP address or username. Either way, no one can keep privacy in this netoworks no matter celebrities or contributors.

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This week’s reading, The Exploit – A Theory of Networks by Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, is a short book compared to the previous books throughout the semester. However, it is not that easy to understand. Is it because the authors are trying hard to explain the networks between “human” and “nonhuman” or “unhuman”? Galloway and Thacker repeatedly mention networks as political, biological, and technical – networks of terrorism, AIDS, and the Internet in Part I. Nodes, and the relationship between disease, code, and war in Part II. Edges. Perhaps, I had never thought about “protocol” in biological networks – how human disease or health and computer network are relevant.

“But are networks always exclusively “human”? Are networks misanthropic? Is there a “nonhuman” or an “unhuman” understanding of networks that would challenge us to rethink the theory and practice of networks?” (p.27)

Computer is nonhuman, and animals like monkeys, chickens, cows, and pigs are nonhuman too. We, computers, animals and humans should have our own networks. However, this is not always the case. In the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first, WHO and CDC identified “emerging infectious diseases” which were developed by rapidly mutating microbes and were widely spread around the world in a short period of time. In Nov 2002, SARS Outbreak started the first case of an atypical pneumonia in the Guangdong province in southern China, then spread to Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the United States, Canada through not only the biological network, but also transportation, institutional, and communications networks. Then, we had Mad Cow Disease from cow, West Nile from mosquito, H5N1/Blue Flu from bird. In 2009, another emerging  infectious diseases Swine Flu/H1N1 Outbreak from pig spread globally. Last time, when SARS hit the world, the public health organizations, local hospitals, physicians, citizens around the world were not prepared for such a rapidly grown outbreak. This time, the world is better prepared when Swine Flu attacked.

“The good virus concept is not limited to the digital domain, however. Epidemiologists have long understood that infectious diseases take advantage of a range of networks, many of them human made: biological networks of humans and animals, transportation networks, communications networks, media networks, and sociocultural networks. Media and sociocultural networks can work as much in favor of the virus as against it – witness the pervasive media hype that surrounds any publc health news concerning emerging infectious diseases.” (p.119)

Now, many public health organizations and news media have Twitter accounts – @CDCFlu, @RedCross, @cnnbrk, and @whonews to report first-hand health updates, as well as Facebook profiles – CNN, WHO, CDC to share health tips and use those information networks to interact with people globally.

Galloway and Thacker use the popular computer game SimCity as an imaging example. The gamer is an official CDC virus hunter who develops and builds a city, manages the health of the citizens and watches for potential disease outbreaks. “This would help illustrate the future of the network model of public health, iself already fully digitized, online, and multiplayer. The SimCity example reminds me a H1N1 swine flu world map that I found when the outbreak started it few weeks later.

Dr. Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher (biological networks) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, put up the FluTracker map and the data using technology networks of Rhiza Labs and Google Map (or transportation networks). The information are gathered from official news media (media networks), global organizations (communication networks), and user-generations (socialcultural) and updated daily. The data includes the numbers of the swine flu cases in the cities and countries, the details of each case, color codes of suspected and fatal cases. Although FluTracker sounds only like the baby stage of the health version of SimCity, it still contains all the networks that Galloway and Thacker describes in the book.

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I am a married Asian female at mid 30’s and pursuing a master degree in the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas in USA. “She” is a girl at the age range of 10-14 in need of basic school supplies, hygiene items, clothes, toys, candies, etc. living in a poor country. We are not family and friends. We don’t know each other, not even each other’s names. We have nothing in common, except we both are females. According to Six Degrees – The Science of A Connected Age written by Duncan J. Watts, she is just anyone to me. So, what is it so important then?

Recently I have joined a program called Operation Christmas Child organized by Samaritan’s Purse. Every participant fills an empty shoe box with a variety of gifts that will bring joy to a child during Christmas time. It is necessary to determine whether the gift will be for a boy or a girl, the age range: 2-4, 5-9, or 10-14. Then the shoe box will be randomly delivered to a kid in the poor, developing countries.

Before reading Watt’s Six Degrees, I felt that I was physically and mentally thousands miles away from this unknown girl – no information of her name, actual age, her hometown, her appearance, and her background. I thought it would take many steps and connections to send my gift-filled shoe box to her. Watt quoted Milgram’s question, “how many someones are in the chain?” (p.38) At this moment, I still don’t know which girl will receive my shoe box in December.

As Ouisa says in Guare’s play, “everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice…. It’s not just the big names. It’s anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. an Eskimo.” (p.41)

It is fascinating and encouraging to learn the theory of how one can reach anyone in the world within 6 steps. Although the girl who will receive my shoe box is probably a poor, little village girl living thousands miles away, the theory will still work for her – anyone. It really makes me feel like being a lot closer to her.

If I apply Milgram’s small-world hypothesis to my shoe box, I only can send the box to someone I know who he/she think is somehow close to the target. Here is what I think the steps:

1. I drop off the shoe box to the coordinator from my church
2. My church coordinator drops the box to the coordinator from Operation Christmas Child
3. The coordinator from Operation Christmas Child will send the box to the coordinator in the developing country.
4. The coordinator in the developing country will deliver the gift to the girl

Now I am connected with the girl after 4 steps. This is what is called “the world is small.”

The above example is only 1 gift to 1 kid. If I want to spread the shoe box gift ideas to more people who will be aware of the needy kids. Imagine I tell 5 of my friends, then the 5 of my friends will tell another 5 of their friends (including myself). Like Ego’s pure branching network example from the book (p.39), I will be reaching 105 people within three degrees of separation. If everyone is willing to participle the shoe box campaign and assumed that no one is clustering, ideally there will be 105 more kids to have a joyful Christmas. Not to mention if reaching six degrees.

However, it is very common that two individuals who have a common friend in social networks because we tend to group with people with similar geographical, ideological or cultural background.”Clustering breeds redundancy.” (p.40)

I hope my example of applying the small-world phenomenon is correct.

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After reading Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics by Danah Michele Boyd, the first thing popping up in my mind was my teenage cousin who was born and grew up in Oakland, CA. I immediately logged on Facebook and had a short interview with him through Facebook Chat. I still remembered 12 years ago, when I first met him, he was just a 3-year-old little boy who could just barely say a few things. And now we became “friends” in social networking platform and chat on Facebook.

Edison, a 15-year-old Asian American, started his Facebook experience a year ago when he considered himself to become mature at the age of 14. Most of his friends started their Facebook profile at their 8th grade. His sister Alice who just turned 14 years old this year also started her Facebook profile last week.

Everyday, Edison spends 4 hours on Facebook at home after he is done with homework and studies. Most importantly, his friends won’t go on Facebook very early during the day because their parents won’t let them use computers till they are done with homework, especially Asian parents. Although Edison is on Facebook, he will hide the page with computer game and not let his parents know about his comments and online social activities on Facebook. The reason is that Facebook is the only channel for him to vent out his opinions and say things that he won’t tell his parent as well as families who live close by. By hiding the Facebook page will not trigger his parent signing up a Facebook profile, learn about the social networking media and become “his friends”, because he hated parent say “hello” on his Facebook which will make him look lamb in front of his peers. Sooner or later, his parent will find out about his friends and comments. However, he will add the “friendly adults” who are considered his relatives and don’t live close by to his friend lists because he knows that they won’t report anything to his parent or monitor his activities. To him, I am one of the “friendly adults” so I can get a chance to comment on his wall. One of his aunts, his dad’s youngest sister who lives in the same town with them, got deleted from Edison’s friend list after he added her in once because he wanted to keep himself “safe”. He knew that his aunt would stop him doing Facebook and report to his dad him actively on Facebook.

“When pushed to define their audience, teens often focused on who they thought should not be viewing their profile. By and large, teens emphasized that adults were not part of their intended audience.” (p.144)

In Edison’s case, his parent and his aunt are not allowed to view his profile because he thinks that this is the only privacy he has in his world rather than his home. Also, his parent don’t care about the use of technology and its importance. To him, talking computer technology and Facebook to parent is a tough job. They will never get it.

When Edison was signing up his profile page, he was at the age of 14. However, he put 1990 on his birthday because he thought Facebook would only allow the user to access Facebook at the age of 18 or above. In fact, “you will not use Facebook if you are under 13″ under Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities at 4. Registration and Account Security. To him, it doesn’t really matter how old he is as long as his friends know his age. He won’t add any strangers to his friend list anyway.

“Uncountable teens respond to requests for name, age, location, income, and other demographic information with responses that do not accurately reflect the teen’s ‘true’ identity.” (p.148)

Edison also likes to change his display name whenever he feels like to. Last week, he changed his name to Edward Cullyn because Edison’s hairstyle looked like Edward Cullen’s, one of the actors in a new movie The Twilight Saga: New Moon which will be showing in the theater on Nov 20, 2009. By giving a little bit of character to the name and making fun of his friends, Edison spells Cullyn differently than the original Cullen. In next couple week, when the movie is over, Edward will be changed back to Edison.

This is the norm of Facebook teen. Their profile information are not totally accurate to tell who they are because they don’t really care the importance of accurancy. It is not because they are lying on Facebook, but they think Facebook is a playground for them to have fun and hang out with peers than to follow the rules and concern the accuracy of every single info/comment they put in.

“Fake content is not the same as lying because those who know him can see that it is him.”

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Lisa Nakamura in Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction tried to “transcode” the online language of race and racialism, and “coined the term ‘cybertype’ to describe the distinctive ways that the internet propagates, disseminate, and commodifies images of race and racism.” (p.318) Yet, “users are able to express themselves online interacts with the “culture layer” or ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace.”

Recently I am addicted to a Facebook application Cafe World at which I, as the chef, can cook different kinds of food from different cultures such as American (cheeseburger), Mexican (chips and guacamole), Chinese (peking duck), Italian (pizza), French (french onion soup), and Arabic (kabobs) to serve in my restaurant. Moreover, I get a chance to dress my avatar (or myself) in different outfits from girlish to boyish, from causal to dressy, and from western to eastern style, wear different makeup or eye wears, and change my facial colors and features everyday.One day, I can look like a Hispanic girl with sexy dress and lots of makeup on.  The next day, I want to look like a Japanese in a kimono outfit and a pair of wood sandals . Sometimes I would just want to be a professional chef. However, I don’t often portrait my avatar to be “white” like what Nakamura defined in her research:

“on cross-racial impersonation in an online community reveals that when users are free to choose their own race, all were assumed to be white. And many of those who adopted non-white personae turned out to be white male users masquerading as exotic samurai and horny geishas.” (p.319)

I wonder what geographical group Nakamura got her data from. Did the users live in non-western (or non-white) countries so they want to portrait themselves “white” while the real “white” males who live in “white” world would rather be samurai and geishas? As for myself, I have lived in America, a white dominant culture, and seen “white” everyday. I probably don’t have strong feeling of being a “white”. Instead, I prefer to be a horny Japanese geisha or a exotic Hispanic chick because I am not in one of those environments and cultures, and want to experience it. Microsoft’s corporate slogan “where do you want to go today?” definitely speaks my soul because I want to travel around the world. Here it raises up another question, “do human beings normally look at what they don’t have rather than they have?”



Secondly, Cafe World is probably one of those online games which provide the platforms for the gamers to customize their own “after/image” in different genders and races as gamer’s desire. After reading Nakamura’s cybertyping article, I think the game designers and developers actually have deeper thoughts of the wide varieties of outfits, skin colors, facial features, etc. Not everybody can experience different cultures. None of us in the world can be in different races. Once we are in one race, we will have to stick with that race forever. The online game world is a utopian which will allow us to fulfil our dreams of being different racials. Nakamura’s arguement “when natives stop acting like natives… their aura is lost: they are no longer authentic.” However, does it really matter? I would think that the natives will create different auras which will make themselves fit in more than one culture. In fact, I think the world is heading to this direction. When one culture interact with another culture online, both cultures learn from each other and pick up the good things from one culture to another.

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After 10 weeks of reading from articles to books, Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody finally speaks our current language, our current culture, our current social behavior, and our current “friendships”.

Shirky began his book with an interesting story of the loss of Ivanna’s multifunctional mobile phone called Sidekick in a New York City cap. Her friend Evan Guttman, who was a programmer working in the financial industry, was trying to help Ivanna to get the phone back from a Hispanic girl, Sasha, who had the phone and was unwilling to return to the original owner. Evan decided to give Sasha “a lesson on the etiquette of returning people’s lost belongings” (2) by putting the “StolenSidekick” case online to his personal website at EvanWasHere.com, and spreaded the words to his friends. Later on, Evan’s story reported on Digg where got lots of attentions from more readers. Many readers was willing to help and encourage Evan doing the right thing. New York City Police Department (NYPD), which originally filed Ivanna’s phone as lost property, was pressured by the public to amend the case as stolen. Within 3 weeks from the date of Ivanna leaving her phone in the cap, NYPD arrested Sasha, recovered the stolen Sidekick, and returned to Ivanna.

Sasha’s mother told a reporter, “I never in my life thought a phone was gonna cause me so many problems.” As Shirky wrote, “It wasn’t the phone that caused the problems, though. It was the people at the other end of the phone, people who had come together around Evan’s page, who found the MySpace profiles and the family’s address and helped pressure the police department, all in a busy ten days, and all of it leading to Sasha’s arrest.”(6)

Although not everybody would be lucky enough to get the stolen phone back, and have a friend like Evan who has the ability, time, and motivation to stand for the righteousness if the same case happens to us, Evan’s action on the StolenSidekick page, a tiny virtual place, was really moving the world. This stolen phone story reminds me a video I watched earlier this year.

A female passenger along with her son and husband was late and missed the flight flying from Hong Kong to San Francisco. She was freaking out, crying out loud, and rolling on the floor at the boarding gate at the Hong Kong International Airport. One of the check-in customer contact staff recorded the entire scene with his cell phone and sent to his friend. His friend posted the video at Youtube. Shortly after, the video was gone viral through the social networking sites – Facebook, MySpace, email, and online forums, etc., and spreading the incident to Chinese or non-Chinese around the world. In less than a week, there were over 6 millions hits at this Youtube video, over 21,000 text comments, and over 8,000 ratings, which became the highest video hit of the month in Feb 2009. People named the lady “Airport Mama”, discussed her reaction in online forums. Later on, the video had reached to Airport Mama who was told by her families and relatives. She was angry and filed a complaint to Cathey Pacific Airline why they would allow their staff to film the video and post it online to embarrass her in front of the world.

Cathey Pacific felt sorry to let such thing happen to Airport Mama, and was willing to compensate her with a free upgrade to business class on the next trip. The customer contact staff got internal punishment and did an apology to her. The incident was also reported in all news presses in Hong Kong. However, it was not the end of the story.

After the news was published, a open-to-public Facebook Discussion Board was created by another staff immediately. The group member was not limited to staff, but anyone who was dissatisfied the unfair treatment from Cathey Pacific to the check-in staff could join. Members posted their opinions on the wall, and judged how the company would scarifice the staff to fulfil the unreasonable requests or complains from the customers in the future.

This incident was full of unexpectations. How did the check-in staff know his sharing of a random video to a friend would bring such a big impact to the world and became the highest hit of the month in Youtube? How did his friend know his mindless video uploading would spread virally, offend the female passenger, get his friend and the airline into big troubles? How could Cathey Pacific Airline expect their staff recording video at work, which was leading to the complaint by an angry customer? How did the lady know her over-reaction would be recorded by a phone and viewed by over 6-million times around the world?

It wasn’t the video that caused the problems, though. It was the check-in staff recording the video, his friend sharing the video, people who spreaded the Youtube video through social-networking sites worldwide, and the lady’s friends and relatives who watched the video reporting to her.

“Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done with affect society as a whole.” (23)

“These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere.” (24)

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I have been having hard time to understand Jurgen Habermas’ the concept of the public sphere, and hope that I get it correctly.

According to Habermas, the public sphere means “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens.” Private individuals could group together as a public body to discuss their common interests and express their opinions freely in a coffeehouse, a marketplace, or a salon . Although it was claimed that this was for ALL citizens, the “public” authority was just represented by the state authority. Back in 1962, the media of the public sphere were newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.

Then, we move on to Pieter Boeder’s article – Habermas’ heritage: The future of the public sphere in the network society. Boeder discusses the problem of the public sphere we are facing in the digital age today.

Boeder claimed that the emergence of the electronic mass media have made the case even worse in the public sphere. The news on the internet, online forum, from the news media seem to speak for the public or act like a representative of the public sphere. However, this is in appearance only. We used to watch news on TV, listen the radio, read the newspaper to get the trust-worthy news although they were not the real representatives of the public sphere. Now, we, especially the younger generation, get news from internet, Facebook, Twitter, forum, word of mouth from unknown internet users. How do we know if the news we learn from internet are reliable?

“The public sphere is discovered as a platform for advertising.” When we are purchasing a new product online, we don’t know whether this new stuff will work good for you or your family. The first thing we will look at is the customer review. However, the goal of getting higher sales pitch in advertising campaigns by promoting the brand using the famous celebrities, giving away samples, and sending out coupons, will distract the private individuals to give their opinions. Those private opinion can’t represent the public opinion. “The media serve as vehicles for generating and managing consensus and promoting capitalist culture rather than fulfill their original function as organs of public debate.”

The public sphere in 1962 was physically a marketplace, a coffehouse, a salon, an organization or a newspaper. Now, the public shpere is conceptually a virtual platform for gathering, conversation, opinion, debate within society. Boeder claimed, “the power of state and corporation to engage in electronic surveillance in civil society threatens both the rights of groups to speak and organise and the privacy rights of individuals.” However, this is not the case anymore, at least in American. Today’s online forum, personal or commercial blogs, Facebook group, Twitter message, etc. create a online marketplace for messaging, gaming, social-networking, doing business. The citizens in the above social platforms have freedoms to talk about everything from poltical issues, professions, interest, society, religion, disease, war, game, health, baby, marriage, investment, realty, business, technology, automobile, etc.

Boeder claimed that the internet distored communications because it is dorminated by English speaking, educated, white males from USA. The influence is based on this group of men than the general public. “If Internet use expands into middle-income groups, lower-income groups and women, it may yet present a real opportunity for greater participation, democratic communication and a true revitalisation of the public sphere” (Thornton, 1996) Although now internet has been widely spread to different levels in the society. There are still a big group of people who aren’t able to express themselves, debate or represent themselves online , for examples, those who don’t have computer skills, people or elders know nothing about internet.

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The traditional model of communication process, like a loop, has always been in its linear form – a sending passing a message to a receiver. In the reading Encoding/Decoding, Stuart Hall criticized that this model lacked of a structured concept for more complex relations and may not apply for distinctive moments such as production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction. Hall introduced Marx’s approach to sustain a continuous loop “production-distribution-production” through a “passage of forms” for those distinctive moments mentioned above in our modern media systems.

Hall used the television communicative process as an example.”The broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discourse, and be meaningfully decoded.” (165) The decoded meanings will influence, entertain, instruct or persuade the society in perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioral results. However, the encoding meaning and decoding meaning may not stay the same depending on how the encoder-producer interprets and decoder-receiver understands. Distortions or misunderstanding may affect the messages and meanings.

“Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed – the effect of an articulation between sign and referent – but to be ‘naturally’ given. Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a ‘near-universality’ in this sense: though evidence remains that even apparently ‘natural’ visual codes are culture-specific.” (167) When Hall mentioned the code in culture aspect, it reminds me a very good example of praise between American and Chinese cultures. In American culture, when one has established a goal, other will praise as appreciation or encouragement. One will be proud of oneself by saying “thank you” for the praising. For example, a kid finishes a puzzle work, parent will praise the kid’s achievement with positive words or applause. The kid should feel proud. However, this is not the case in Chinese culture. If the same situation happens, Chinese still accepts the compliment by other deep down of his/her heart and feel proud of achieving the goal. Instead of saying “thank you”, they would simply deny the honor by saying “no, I am not as good as you think” and rather be humble, Humbleness is a good attitude and acting too proud is impolite in Chinese culture. This is why Chinese parents do not normally praise their kids although they have scored A or 100% in school. This is also how we grew up and “learned at so early an age.” If an American praises a Chinese, and the Chinese may typically disagree the compliment, normally the American may think that this is rude. It may hurt your feeling. However, please don’t get mad yet, because the Chinese friend is just acting humble and still feeling so happy in heart. “Praise”and “appreciation” appear to be the universal codes. However, the decoding in different cultures can cause distortions or misunderstandings of the meanings and messages. “But we must not be fooled by appearances.” (167)

To continue Hall’s discussion of the encoding and decoding, he gave an example of “cow” in different meanings in visual sign, linguistic sign, arbitrary sign, iconic sign. “So it is at the connotative level of the sign that situational ideologies alter and transform signification.” (168) It leads me to think of the sign for “beauty” in this society and culture – how the advertisers encode “beauty,” and how the audiences decode “beauty.” So I google searched and found a skinny model on Ralph Lauren advertisement at boingboing.net. It is another extreme Photoshop-distorted skinny female selling the fashion trend.

“Every visual sign in advertising connotes a quality, situation, value or inference, which is present as an implication or implied meaning, depending on the connotational positioning.” (168)

What message is the advertiser trying to encode in this ad? What is the meaningful discourse? What message does the audience receive after decoding based on their background? How the decoded meanings influence, entertain, instruct or persuade our society/culture with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioral consequences?

Let’s follow Hall’s analysis and interpret this advertisement. The extreme skinny and tall model figure signifies a “lacking sufficient flesh, 6ft female” (denotation) and thus the activity/value of “selling size XXXS Ralph Lauren blouse and jeans. On the connotational positioning, it is also possible to signify “the ideal American beauty of female figure in the upcoming season”, “the most fashionable style of tight shirt and extremely long and lean jeans”, or “the representative of eating disorder becoming a top model of a famous brand.”

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This week’s reading The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich is a lot easier than the past readings because the 5 Principles of New Media are actually what we are experiencing. At least I don’t feel like reading the history books or articles anymore although the new media introduced by Manovich have been more well-developed since 2001, the year he wrote the book.

Since I have been graphic and website design for a long time, I would want to apply what I have known to explain how Manovich’s Principles of New Media works.

1. Numerical Representation

“All new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations.” (27)

To draw a red color box in a web page, we can do it in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that the designers and developers can style the page, text, layout of the HTML page. The example is as follow:

#box a { position: absolute; top: 100px; left: 75px; width: 38px; height: 82px; background-color: #FF0000; }

#box a
This is how we describe the box identity. In this case, we call it box a.

position: absolute; top: 100px; left: 75px;
This is how the web developer position the box absolutely at the location of 100 pixels from the top, and 75 pixels from the left of the HTML page.

width: 38px; height: 82px;
The box is 38 pixel wide and 82 pixel tall.

background-color: #FF0000;
The background color of the box is #FF0000 which is the heximal color code representing red.

By looking at the CSS line, it is hard to tell that this is a shape of a red box described by whole bunch of digital codes. However, this is exactly Manovich’s first principle of new media – numerical representation.

2. Modularity

The example of WWW was still very new in 2001 when Manovich was writing the book. Today, we have the social media networking sites – Facebook and MySpace, WordPress, Google accounts, etc. “This principle can be called the ‘fractal structure of new media.’ Just as a fractal has the same structure on different scales, a new media object has the same modular structure throughout.” (30) All of the Facebook and My Space users are sharing the same modular structure, but with different applications, profiles, walls, photos, videos, etc. They can add whatever they like in their personal pages. There is a major difference between 2001 and 2009 of the NEW media. The modularity of WWW before was limited to a company or a person, and could only be modified by specific persons such as system admin, web developers. Now the fractal structure of new media is more user driven. Users can move around their pieces within the fractal structure.

3. Automation

“The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. Thus human intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part.” (32)

When Manovich mentioned the automation, the first thing popping up in my mind is the Google Web Search. This little search box sitting at the top right corner of my Firefox browser offers helpful suggestions similar to what I am typing. Sometimes I just don’t remember the exact spellings, it becomes a great tool to spell out words. Although searching keywords are not something creative, but I think the suggestions from Google can bring me some new results that I never think of. From this point, I agree with Manovich that human can be removed from part of the “creative searching process.”

4. Variability

“A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions. This is another consequence of the numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2).” (36)

With CSS, website is no longer just fitting in a desktop or laptop web browsers. It can be set for printing on paper to avoid printing junk information or getting rid of white text on dark background. Also, it can be styled for the little screen in mobile device as many of us are banking, emailing, Facebooking, Twittering, etc in our mobiles. Different versions of the website standard are a must.

Following is the code to show how to style different versions of website in CSS.

(reference by Optimizing websites for iPhone and Android)

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style_print.css” media=”print” type=”text/css” />

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css” media=”screen and (min-device-width: 481px)” type=”text/css” />

<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)” href=”style_mobile.css” />

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style_mobile.css” media=”handheld” type=”text/css” />

5. Trancoding

“New media in general can be thought of as consisting of two distinct layers – the ‘cultural layer’ and the ‘computer layer.’”(45) According to Manovich, story and point of view are under the cultural layer while sorting, computer language and data structure are under the computer layer, our weekly EMAC blog entries that we are writing are definitely falling into these two layers, same as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace.

“The computer layer and the culture layer influence each other. To use another concept from new media, we can say that they are being composited together. The result of this composite is a new computer culture – a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it.” (46)

All in all, I would want to share an AT&T “You Will” video to show how the language of the new media has been changing since 1993.

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