new

So it’s a new year. With new promises of adventure and abandon. I’ve been neglecting this blog as of late. I’ve been struggling with what to put in here, and what kind of outlet it could be. In this New Year I am trying to commit to weekly posts, but as you may know, that’s how this whole endeavor started.

I’ve decided to expand the scope of this blog a little beyond my own work. For those who know me personally, you are aware of my rapidly approaching departure for the east coast to attend the New School to get my masters degree in media theory. The thought of grad school both excites and terrifies me. But I am eager to be back in an academic setting. With these thoughts in mind I wish to use this blog to not only explore my work and the work of others but also as a forum to discus the rapidly changing landscape of media content and creation.

A lot of people have asked me what “media theory” is. The truth is the concept is just emerging and means different things to different people. To me, this are discussions around the way media, especially, digital media has woven its way into the very fabric of a contemporary American, and increasingly, global experience. This explores the way mass media is used to inform, control and/or shape opinion, and how grass roots artists simultaneously are pushing the boundaries of media experience through art, and performance art. But also, where the lines of these two, seemingly opposing doctrines of content creation, blur.

I’m also expressly interested in the way that the mass media of American capitalism has formed the current cultural paradigm of “branding”. I speak of branding as a paradigm because it is wholly culturally understood and accepted, but also because it is taken for granted, as if brands and branding have always been around.

They have not.

Branding works on multiple levels. Corporations create brand identity to easily facilitate communication about the values and status of products to consumers. Branding also affects the individual, who is sold the ultimate capitalist/American truth/myth of the self reliant man. Hyper-individuality fed by conspicuous consumption creates a “brand identity” for you. With the rise of social networking, we are encouraged to create profiles with tag words indicating our likes and dislikes. And much like a corporate brand identity, your individual brand is disseminated through the world wide web as a means to efficiently communicate information about the “type” of individual you are.

I would argue that these escapist identities are a form of delusion. For the consumer knows that the milk comes from mistreated cows, or the clothes come from china. These realizations stand in stark contradiction to brand identity, and with now way to reconcile them, they are ignored. And if individually we have already begun to take cues from corporate practices of branding, what happens when we are faced with our own internal contradiction?

We aren’t brands, we are people. Our knowledge experience and potential are vastly indescribable, certainly not enough for a facebook page. What does it say about a culture who truncates their experiences and uniqueness to sound bites and keywords? In this age we have to recognize that commercialized information delivery systems cannot be the fundamental organizing principle of a vibrant culture.

All these ideas rest upon the premise of a 21st century enlightenment, or a “digital revolution”. We are seeing the way our culture creates and understands media rapidly change, we are seeing the technology rapidly change, and interestingly enough, after spending thousands of years as a primarily analogue civilization, the leap forward into the digital future has been greatly underestimated, particularly to the way it is shaping the citizenry of cultural attitudes and expectations of the up and coming generation. I will leave you with a short video about some of the concepts that lay the philosophical foundation of some of the ideas I will be exploring in the coming weeks. The video is by RSA Animate who does great animated lectures, if you are a visual person like me, these videos take complex issues and help to break them down visually, hopefully providing more comprehension. This lecture features radical social theorist David Harvey, check it out here.