Personalization of the Media Landscape - Report Example

Personalization of the Media Landscape Introduction In mass media, collective memory defines the shared information that remains common amongst varied people within the society who have access to media landscape. In the contemporary mass media landscape participatory culture have greatly influenced the common information shared amongst people and groups within the society. Various groups including the youths have deviated from the common collective theory defined by mass media participatory culture to initiate personalized social media landscape. The youthful populations have greatly personalized their collective memory through media landscapes as music industry and social media. Similarly, companies and businesses have also personalized media landscape by sharing only information that directly benefits their progress within the society. The business societies have shaped the ancient collective memory by making sharing of media information more personalized through self-advertisement campaigns. It is imperative to note that collective memory within the media have evolved from known movie stars for instance, to segregated personalized media cultures consisting of social groups and the business community. Effect of Participatory culture in influencing change in collective memory and personalization of mass media Participatory culture outlines the impact of memory devices and social media on heritage disclosure. Participatory culture characterizes relatively small barriers to public artistic expression and civic engagement. Moreover, the culture involves substantial support for developing an individual’s creations with other and frameworks for formal and informal mentorship to novices. In such a culture, people feel socially connected with one another all the time (Kuhn 2010). Even though individuals may act at different levels of motivation and expertise, they belong to communities that provide a collective memory through the mass media. In addition, cultures of participation value the creative process and how engaging socially in creative activities changes the way individuals think about others. As emphasized by Jenkins, a participatory culture shifts the attention from personalized expression to community participation. It also reframes literacy from matters of interactive technology to issues of culture attitude (Kuhn 2010). Participatory culture does not just involve producing and consuming user-generated content but also manifested in diverse forms of affiliation, expression, collaboration and distribution (Dijck2011). Participatory culture is not few. For example, amateur arts are an instance of participatory culture. The Amateur Press Association of the middle of the 19th century possibly acts as one of the most commonly known historical examples. However, we are today witnessing a broader and more profound phenomenon. This is the result of a combination of several socio-technical factors. Crating publishing and distributing content requires less time and less money today than in the past. Software that does not require sophisticated programming skills is available and easy to use. With web 2.0 and the spreading of web applications and services that facilitate online information sharing and collaboration, there is not even the need for additional software for installation on the computer. The idea of participatory culture is challenging and in some cases recasting the way in which industries do business, citizens engage in civic and political life. Teachers and students prepare and learn, and people engage in forms of creative expression and new artisanship. The long-term implications of this change are impossible to know, but they raise significant issues. In this more plural and collaborative culture,” the limitations amongst unskillful and skilled, user and creator, ordinary and mainstream are bleached, if not erased” Reading 2009). The impact of social media and emerging cultures of participation in our understanding and experience of heritage is blurring. Thus leading to a questioning of the boundaries of official and unofficial heritage, reshaping and creating new relations between audiences and institutional. Additionally, it fosters grassroots, understanding and manifestations of heritage practice and in general brings to the front living and performance aspects of heritage as part of our present-day existence. The way in which we capture our living experiences, the nature of our artifacts, and the way in which we share them are changing (Reading 2009). Aspects of our lives remains increasingly captured and shared with others. The persons who receive the aspects can themselves annotate and augment these digital traces with their perspectives. Preserving making sense and exchanging everyday artifacts and practices is increasingly becoming a matter of heritage: it brings the past to matter in the present, helping us to tell stories about who we are. In this perspective, cultural relics and practices not only constitute a legacy to future generations, but also perform a vital part in shaping our sense of place and identity. According to Dijick 2007, culture arises with and individual and propagates to the whole world (Dijck 2006). What we see emerging is not simply an opportunity to widen experience from personal to communal interactions. Nonetheless, it is an unstable fluid transference in our understanding of what is at the core of cultural experience and why it is important. If we acknowledge this challenge, then it becomes clear that we cannot widen the margin of how people participate in the social significance of heritage artifacts and places. Humanity should begin to understand how they experience and create culture because of the emerging technologies and social practices How social networking and technology transforms collective memory and personalization of media Everything remains achievable online, quite naturally (Dijck2011). A list of services and websites supporting the production and distribution of digital content has no end. Social networking facilitates this production and distribution. Some of the services and websites include; encyclopedia collaborated projects such as the Wikipedia, question and answer websites such as Quora just to name a few. The social websites coupled with the advent of digital era have resulted into realization of a more personalized media platform an individual’s collective memory interest. Website users remain at liberty to choose his or her collective memory from the vast information provided within the personalized media platforms. Nevertheless, people aggregate and engage in conversation in many and various ways including social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The commonness in using such social media platforms describes a new modified era of collective memory where society can personalize their own ideas. Additionally, with the spread of iPhone, Android and Blackberry smart phones that entail the functions of a mobile phone with that of a small personal computer, social media are increasingly becomes mobile. They are contributing to new mindsets and skill sets, fostering a culture of participation unrestricted by schedules and locations. This mobility promotes a continual activity of interaction in which we immerse and involve, all the time defining a completely modified collective memory (Gye, 2007). Moreover, there is now the possibility of attracting digital data to article relics in the real world through social media sites. For increased reality the tagging of uniquely identifiable objects, or the sensing of patterns of activity and specific behaviors around those relics (Gye, 2007). Thus, the fabric of participation and conversation offered by social media is not simply made of online interactions and virtual experiences. However, it remains intertwined with physical objects, places and activities enhanced with social data and connectivity. The connectivity comes from the cloud of networked web infrastructures, services and data to the real world. The participatory culture is completely altering the directions of the collective memory within the mass media besides its personalization (Reading 2009). Social media gives the society a more central position, creating networked meanings and even more importantly contexts that are subject to rapid change and renegotiation of collective memory and personalization of media landscape (Dijck 2007). In other words, social media build infrastructures of communication and interaction that act as places of cultural production and lasting values at the services of what could remain visible as a new generation of living heritage practices. A critical and fundamental consideration goes beyond learning how to use social media effectively to the memorable and personalized information shared within the platforms (Garde-Hansen 2009). Nevertheless, Social networking is among the widely used sites by the young generation. Most young people use digital media to share ideas and creativity. They also use social network as a memory and remembrance archive. For that reason, social networking plays a vital role in our day-to-day life and the shared pool of information that defines the mass media. The media are a platform where people upload photos, share them and attain everyday mementos thus changing the technique of how memories remains executed. Facebook is among the most used social network among the youth (Keightly 2011). In Facebook, a number of activities remain achievable including uploading photos, sending messages, sharing links and tagging others. In this case the Facebook site acts like a memory archive that defines how society have personalized sharing of information (Olick et al., 2011). Despite Facebook, being among the most used social network it gained prominence after a state-controlled youth station in East Germany remained closed. The social network operated from 1964 to 1993 but by then it had managed to congregate large listeners in western music of which it was the hardest thing to implement in the German Democratic Republic. Unfortunately, the closure of the radio station in 1993 led to protest and continuous street rallies. In spite of the station being closed Facebook gave a new dawn to the people who were devoted to the radio station. They gathered new setting of music in the remembrance of DT64 (Kramer 2011). How modern and traditional media changes collective memory However, as much as people have embraced new media technology the traditional media forms also remains imperative. The traditional media forms include radio, cassettes and notebooks just to name a few while the new media include Facebook, cloud services and digital audio files. Similarly, both the modern and traditional media forms finds use as memory and remembering technologies but they lack a comparative work on digital and connective memory practices (Kramer 2011). Moreover, the internet with its essential purpose towards sharing and instant communication seems to undercut and yet enhance traditional diary features. Hence, we can trace how new digital technologies are transforming our notions of privacy and openness, but they also cast a different light on the relation between personal memory and lived experience. Recorded popular music is vital to the construction of personal memory and musical heritage. The culture that has developed over a period and continued to evolve directly affects music industry. In addition, the role of music in the formation of individual remembering and collective heritage is more than just an individual act. For that matter, we need communal places to share tales and build a creative commons (Kuhn 2002). For instance, technologies have indeed improved in the music industry. Evidently, 98 percent of the music found on the web was using MP3 some years back. Given 1999’s average home computer capability and dial-up internet access speed in the industrialized world, it was taking around four minutes to download every minute of music. An attractive tradeoff between time and accessibility, especially in the realm of popular music, where vastly more material is actually available than can be carried by any music store. The so-called CD ripper software soon appeared; allowing users to grab and encode music off their own CDs. Napster led the MP3 revolution on the web (Kuhn 2002). Accessibility and revolution of music industry has led modification of collective memory in relation to information conveyed through media landscapes. The media landscapes have re-shaped to meet the inherent needs of music industry and consequently changed associated collective memory. However, there exists no inherent difficulty in visualizing how suddenly and profound this could change many of the existing relationships in the popular music industry. While the established industry based around its cycle of band acquisition by labels, promotion, album production, cross-media marketing and distribution via retail outlets was continuing seemingly unaffected by MP3 in the late 1990’s. The new technology opened up a gaping hole in those established procedures through which we were able to glimpse a startling alternative. Whether or not MP3 turns out to be the full realization of that alternative in the longer term, should remain as a realization of the new technology. Not only will the alternative take shape more clearly, perhaps around subsequent technologies rather than MP3. However, it will be only part of the broader shift towards a pop tech world of largely altered relationships among producers and consumers generally, as well as between mainstream culture and proliferating alternatives (Radstone 2007). Musicians and bands could bypass the labels and go straight to listeners via the web and new economic models could remain developed around payments. The distinction between producer and consumer of popular music may create blurredness, as computers became effective recording studios. In addition, at the heart of these changes would be the new concept of listeners own album compiled in a personalized way from the vast range of available choices. The album would also have coherence based on something very different from a band. For the album to remain operation within music industry there must exist a framework to assist in long-term sustenance. New techniques of promotion, marketing and advertising would need to be devised more centrally around the listeners’ preferences and profile rather than the performer’s identity, career and output (Radstone 2007). Now that this reveals, in part because the music industry is as Marcus Breen puts it, a potential leading light for new media studies, is the way that media in general are moving. If rather more ponderously and hesitantly than the hype about digital TV, web TV and so on, might suggest. The, Me-album of music promised by MP3 is only one vision of a shift that appears to be leading toward ME-TV. Beyond that, a whole reorganization of the media landscape around personalization techniques and the pulling out and reassembling by audience members of whatever they want from the passing flows of digital media content of all sorts. Putting ‘me’ into the media may be the pressing agenda for media institutions in the next couple of decades (Dijck 2004). However, Sony’s memory stick concept, a multi-functional audio-visual storage device conceives as a handy means of plugging in and out of various media flows and grabbing content. Nevertheless, the underpinning vision of the direction things are going in may be more important than whether the memory stick itself becomes as successful as the Sony Walkman. The institutional questions remain paramount here (Confino 1997). How can we move towards such a future when the content producers depend for their survival on controlling distribution and aggregating consumers to a sufficient degree that they can profit from it? Listeners ripping tracks from their CD collections and posting them on websites for others to download freely may remain challenging. Such behavior may seem like a radical subversion of large business interests in the concern of the listener. However, it could eventually destroy the business model that generates the content without replacing it with any equally effective alternative (Dijck 2004). However, it is not clear that artists selling their music directly to listener are a model that could survive in a much-deregulated industry. The similar model of shareware computer software, for instance has long remained an economically unreliable and marginal feature of the software industry. The music industry in fact quickly anticipated this threat, as they perceived it in late 1998 when they set up the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). Being the five largest music companies (Sony, BMG, Warner, Universal and EMI), they had to remain vigilant (Erll, 2008). The SDMI aims to introduce mandatory protocols for the technologies and for the distribution of digital music that will constrain users to downloading only from authorized web sites (Erll and Nünning, 2010) . For example, by ‘Watermarking’ content so that it would only remain recognized there and will prevent the redistribution of ripped material off commercial CDs. While not finalized at the time of writing, these sorts of standard will eventually provide a working compromise between the popular music industry and its listeners (Erll, 2008). References Confino, Alon (1997) ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’ American Historical Review 102(5), 1386-403 Dijck, J. van (2004) Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of Cultural Analysis, Continuum, 18(2), 261-77 Dijck, J. van (2011) ‘Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity: Sharing Views, Experiences, Memories’ Memory Studies 4, 401-15 Dijck, J. van, 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford University Press, Redwood City. Dijck, J. van. (2005) From Shoebox to Performative Agent: The Computer as Personal Memory Machine New Media & Society 7 (3), 311-32 Dijck, J. van. (2006) ‘Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory’ 23(5), 357-74 Erll, A., Nünning, A., 2010. A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Gye, L. (2007) ‘Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photograpic Practices’ Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 21(2), 279–88 Keightly, Emily (2011) ‘From Dynasty to Songs of Praise: Television as Cultural Resource for Gendered Remembering’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(4), 395-410 Kramer, Ann-Marie (2011) ‘Mediatizing Memory: History, Affect and Identity in Who Do You Think You Are?’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(4), 411-27. Kuhn, A., 2002. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. Verso, London. Kuhn, Annette (2010) Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances Of Memory in and with Visual Media Memory Studies 3(4), 298-313 Olick, J.K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V., Levy, D., 2011. The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford University Press, New York. Radstone, S., 2007. The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory. Routledge, London. Reading, A. (2009) ‘Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories’ in Joanne Garde-Hansen et al, eds Save as . . . Digital memories New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 81–95 Read More