Week 3 “Digitisation” and Week 4 “Activism in the era of social media” sent me home with quite a few things to contemplate. I was particularly interested in Winner’s article ‘Do Artefacts Have Politics?’ (1986), where he argued that artifacts do indeed have political qualities, either by design (intentional or otherwise) (Winner, p. 124)or by their inherent properties (Winner, p. 126). I was interested in exploring how the design of social media gave them political qualities when I stumbled upon this podcast, in which the host and several academics discussed the conversations happening on Twitter.

In their 2019 study “Attentional capture helps explain why moral and emotional content go viral,” Brady et. al. concluded that those that use “moral words (such as crime, mercy, right), emotional words (such as afraid, love, weep) and moral-emotional words (such as abuse, honor, spite) captured more attention than neutral ones (such as coast, novel, maze)” (Brady et. al., 2019). Upon studying 50,000 tweets, the authors concluded that tweets that used moral, emotional, or moral-emotional words used in Tweets were significantly more likely to be shared or liked.

Twitter profits from its users’ data and interactions, so the social media’s algorithm tends to amplify and distribute tweets that gain more interactions. Thus, it became a platform where people spread outrage.

Twitter today is one of the most prevalent social media sites in the world, with almost 126 million daily users all over the world. The micro-blogging platform was originally founded to help people connect with their friends. Now, it’s where people find breaking news, trends, express themselves (outrage being one of them), and have a direct conversation with celebrities, politicians, and influencers.

I don’t believe Twitter was originally designed to be political (that is, to discriminate on certain groups or give others more power and authorities). However, its prevalence, accessibility, and especially the ability to empower people to voice their opinions, have turned it into a chaotic space where people argue over who’s right and bully others in order to benefit their agenda. Due to their ability to spark emotions (Brady et. al.), tweets that express strong emotions (i.e. outrage) gain a bigger exposure and reach more people. Thus, certain figures (i.e. Donald Trump) continue to have power and authority on this platform, while other voices (#MeTooUyghurs) are silenced.

Just like the tomato harvester example that Winner gave in his article, “what we see here is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power” (Winner, p. 126). In other words, Twitter’s political qualities were results of not only its design but also supporting structures, corporate decisions, political agendas, and even its users.

The NPR podcast also discusses how this design is problematic for civil society, since Twitter only enables its users to create echo-chambers to echo their own views, without actually creating conversations around certain topics. I find that this is an example of Downey & Fenton (2003)’s argument that the online public sphere is increasingly fragmented (p. 189), and that it is made up of many different echo-chambers that allow users to communicate with others with similar view – or what we discussed in class – “preaching to the choir.” This is not beneficial to civil society, since all this talking is not equivalent to engaging in dialogue that can prompt change in civil society.

Sources: 

Downey, J. and Fenton, N. (2003). New Media, Counter Publicity and the Public Sphere. New Media & Society, 5(2), pp.185-202.

Van Bavel, J. and Gantman, A. (2019). Why Moral Emotions Go Viral Online. [online] Scientific American. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-moral-emotions-go-viral-online/ [Accessed 29 Oct. 2019].

Winner, L. (2019). Do Artefacts Have Politics?. In: The Whale and the Reactor: a Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.19-39.

This week, we’re discussing digitization and information politics, and how we’re balancing between liberation and exploitation in information politics. For this week, I find this example of digitization particularly intriguing:

In this video, Vox Media (2018) discusses how Instagram is changing art museums. In installation art, people and their interaction with the piece is the main thesis of the art piece. Since Instagram has taken the world by storm, art museums are increasingly shaping their museum experience to fit people’s desires to take photos for Instagram. The video also notes that since they’ve changed in this sense, museum visits have risen but people’s enjoyment of them has gone down.

Here, we can see the perfect example of how people are quantifying an “analog” experience into a digital form. Museum experiences were previously analog in the sense that it was continuous – impossible to quantify or divided into countable units. In the Vox video, we can see that museum art is increasingly digitized by the Instagram generation and museums are creating experiences around that.

In a sense, I think it suggests that the Instagram photos of the art pieces are also a part of the art piece itself – a very digital, quantifiable art piece. It’s certainly the case for most of the art pieces created by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. When you search Kusama’s name on Instagram, the main result that comes up is people’s interaction with her artworks, not just the works themselves.

In his chapter “What is ‘Post-Digital”, Cramer (2015) argues that it’s pointless to discuss anything digital because we’re living in the digital age where everything has an underlying digital layer (p. 23). Instead, he discusses the concept of “post-digital” – an ongoing continuation of digital culture. I find that this example of “Instagramable museums” perfectly captures the struggle of post-digital age, where offline experiences need to be transferred into digital forms to reach a bigger population, but it almost subdues the experience itself.

This example also illustrates the principles of new media in Manovich’s “The Language of New Media” (2001). Although the museum exhibitions themselves are analog (p. 23), I believe they can be counted as “new media” because they encourage people to create their own digital version of the artworks using social media photos. One thing that’s especially interesting about these exhibits is the new media notion of “variability” – they are experienced in countless different ways, and each “session” is a unique experience for a person because no two Instagram photos are the same.

However, it doesn’t mean it’s good that museums are increasingly post-digital. Some say that the very presence of social media in this space affects people’s perceptions and enjoyments of the artworks. Even if that’s the case, digitized museum experiences are here to stay, and museums are shaping their artworks to serve this purpose.

References: 

Cramer, F. (2015). What is ‘Post-Digital’. In: D. Berry and M. Dieter, ed., Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation, and Design. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.13 – 26.

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. London: MIT Press.

YouTube. (2018). How ‘Instagram traps’ are changing art museums. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/Qx_r-dP22Ps [Accessed 16 Oct. 2019].

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