INTERNET: Public? Private?
The article questions the term "new". "NEW MEDIA", "NEW TECH", what is really new? Even though the technologies and devices were newly invented, people still use them to facilitate the old forms of communication and behaviors. The existing life form and experiences direct the role of new tech when they join human life.
Domestication refers to the process of a tech being more and more accessible.
Like the line of Telephone--wireless phone--smartphone--internet phone. Is it a series of iterations of the same product, a transmission of a particular medium, or a series of individual devices with similar qualities?
Digital culture is an ongoing process. It shapes the behaviors of its users, and the users shape its features and even quality (what digital tech does), so-called INTER-active, not only RE-active. If once tech misunderstood the user's intention and gives a funny result, the association will be intertwined in the user's consciousness, like the typo-inspired cyber-expressions (网络语言). The digitalization process may affect our understanding of the analog object being coded in 1s and 0s. What is its essence? The 1-0 codes or the face underlie it?
The digital world and the "real world" can not be clearly split.
Tech-determinism argues that tech drives human history. However, technologies are born from the cultural background their inventor has. Tech is not independent from the users. It is a series of devices and practices. Tech is not only what the tool does, it is also what it does not do, what we do not want it to do.
There is power inequality in the forming process of the digital world. Some cultures are widely represented, while some are not.
The imagination of the Digital World/Cyberspace.
Is people's imagination shaped by some widely shared assumptions and works? How does a person's idea of geography change with the fantasy of the light lines? How does the tech impact the person's idea of community, self, and privacy being in an always-connected status?
The internet is built on a physical base. The virtual space exists only with the array of servers, routers, fibers, and so on that are distributed all over the globe.
Virtual space is not always digitally delivered. A novel is a virtual world. The virtual world is not a state, but a concept. The question is how does the involvement of digital devices affect the capacity and quality of the long-existing virtual experiences?
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3 IDEAS 🤯
1. people-net
a physical representation of the cyberSpace
The Internet is essentially a digitalized net of people. An abstract form of the user is presented over space. I can try to reform this practice with real people in the same physical space as nodes. Ask them to behave what they do online. Maybe some physical stuff, like threads, can visualize the connection.
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2. human as a media form
A medium experiment
Almost all the "mediums" we discussed are external. Is it possible to transform humans into a form of medium? Media is anything between us. What if it is a human? The activities with a middleman already exist, but the middleman is too dynamic to be a static medium. It is more like a role in social activities. If a socially engaged practice never ends, in what form will it last? As community?
3. between public and private
What does the digital space bring?
Less limitation in space resources? space as waste. The digital world can expand without geographical limitations. Attention (Visiting) replaces physical bodies as the mark of the prosperity level of a digital space.
In the physical world, the line between public space and private space is the community size that has access permission. Digitally, you may consider a low-traffic site private, but it is possible to gain large traffic someday and become somehow public. You cannot set an open space online and announce it is "private". No matter how low the traffic is, as long as it is open, it has the responsibility of public space.
The determination of private/public is also imagined. If users' editing of their private space/site generates changes in the appearance of the other user's private site, is it still private?
secret tube: everyone can see your message but your identity is not revealed. Is this private or public?
4. A demonstration of Unconscioused Bias
I think what is happening on theinternet can be well depicted by of story Blind men and an elephant (Several blind people are asked to touch an elephant from different poaitions and describe what an elephant is like. Each blind person describes a single part of the elephant, and no one finds out the whole image of an elephant). And I am considering to extract this factor from collective online behaviours.
5. Experiments of Environments
Inspired by the AI character growing simulation experiment, I realized using AI to test the atmosphere of an environment is a brilliant idea. What digital space needs to get tested? Is it possible to apply autonomous AI as an influencer in digital space? What will happen if AI with different behaviors are put in the same digital space?