Homeless people have little voice in a capiltalist society, but they are represented on the web in a newish vlog (Just over a month) called invisible people. Besides being a facinating sketch on homelessness in Los Angeles (done by a documentors were once was themselves homeless). Invisible People fully utilizes current rss and subscription techniques. The comments are fresh and pertinent as a result. Besides being one of the touching pieces of vlogging, I've ever seen, invisible people has an active message of change and invites the audience to pay attention and do something.
In a more automatic time the potentials of this blog could further be realized by people responding the day of an interview and talking to these people themselves and bring them from being part of the virtual discourse, to the actual community.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
V: Untill Automation
The automation I have been writing about exists in certain margins, but still isn't quite a reality. We still, mostly, manually check our emails (AOLs You've got mail rings as an anachronism), we still get around to checking many of our favorite websites when we have time. Vlogs come and go, and often aren't viewed until long after they've stopped being updated. Even with readers and mobile devices, many updates elude us.
I think it would behoove documentors to view some works of early innovators and the results garnered until this age on which we are embarking becomes the standard for documentary. At worst you're making documentary that acts like it is being viewed with the immediacy it deserves, and hopefully without the self-importance of CNN's "The Situation Room."
I think it would behoove documentors to view some works of early innovators and the results garnered until this age on which we are embarking becomes the standard for documentary. At worst you're making documentary that acts like it is being viewed with the immediacy it deserves, and hopefully without the self-importance of CNN's "The Situation Room."
IV: Documentary Practice in an Automated Age
The shift towards "YouTube sized" videos has already primed new media documentary for the automatic age, but there are more adaptations emerging (or that could be imagined) that are beginning with the automatic age. The first principle is that documentary is a process rather than a project. The provocative and journalistic elements of non-fiction film, photography, or sound recording are shot in this spirit, but now with the technology, documentaries really don't have to fit in a two hour box, they don't have to appeal to a wide audience, they can expect an immediate response, and they don't have to end at any given point. Documentaries in the automatic age can be corrected if they are proven wrong, they can been amended (vwiki?) by other media producers, and they can expect respond in video to comments written.
These are just a few of the many exciting possibilities of new media documentary. It all changes the way documentary should be made though. If the search for conclusions was fruitless before, now it is self-defeating. When you start a documentary you start a story, that someone else can end, and perhaps wont end for a very long time. One of my favorite examples of continuous documentary is the "7 UP Series," which documents every seven years of a group of people's lives. This documentary series, lasts as long as their lives, and could conceivably spin off into documentation of their children's lives. Amateur film diary artists were among internet documentary's first innovators, posting videos from their lives weekly. The frequency of the postings enabled by the web encourage obbsession I can recall checking back to see if certain webcams were on or had a new post.
In the automated age, we can rest easy and know when our next chapter has been written and continue the story. But when we enter this age, documentors must practice knowing that their products will be viewed and responded to the audience within a shorter span, leaving less need to explain back stories, and more leaving more room for informalities. Imagine making films for strangers that have a tone of informality that you would only use with close friends, like roommates, because perhaps your audience is as available and in touch with you as a roommate might, in fact, be.
The ability to know something right when it happens is a powerful feeling that consumers of information lust for. As a media maker with this kind of ability you can create products with the seeming spontineity of broadcast medias, the permanence of artifact media and the viral capacity and free-use perameters of new media.
These are just a few of the many exciting possibilities of new media documentary. It all changes the way documentary should be made though. If the search for conclusions was fruitless before, now it is self-defeating. When you start a documentary you start a story, that someone else can end, and perhaps wont end for a very long time. One of my favorite examples of continuous documentary is the "7 UP Series," which documents every seven years of a group of people's lives. This documentary series, lasts as long as their lives, and could conceivably spin off into documentation of their children's lives. Amateur film diary artists were among internet documentary's first innovators, posting videos from their lives weekly. The frequency of the postings enabled by the web encourage obbsession I can recall checking back to see if certain webcams were on or had a new post.
In the automated age, we can rest easy and know when our next chapter has been written and continue the story. But when we enter this age, documentors must practice knowing that their products will be viewed and responded to the audience within a shorter span, leaving less need to explain back stories, and more leaving more room for informalities. Imagine making films for strangers that have a tone of informality that you would only use with close friends, like roommates, because perhaps your audience is as available and in touch with you as a roommate might, in fact, be.
The ability to know something right when it happens is a powerful feeling that consumers of information lust for. As a media maker with this kind of ability you can create products with the seeming spontineity of broadcast medias, the permanence of artifact media and the viral capacity and free-use perameters of new media.
III: Vlogging as realization of automatic alertness
Some of the newest and most exciting forms of new media have come in the form of programs that automatically alert information is made available online. These come in the forms of XML feeds and rss readers, twitter (both as social media and link feed) and growing portability of the internet, which allows all of this information to flow. Using these, increasingly user friendly, automation programs, forms of documentary that are otherwise fascinating pieces of new media, now become serial pieces of the world around us that make documentary into a daily experience, and thus that much closer to resembling the world around us.
Vlogging is the best suited current form of new media for documentary, and while vlogs have different sub-categories that distinguish them as yet more different media forms, all vlogs can be subscribed to. Subscribing to a vlog is the closest thing I've experienced to the concept of automatic alertness documentary. My open email tab rings at me as I spend the morning scanning my favorite news feeds. I link the link to a new tab to see my favorite vlog covering current developments in the Bloomberg mayoral campaign has posted a new video of protesters outside of city hall. I watch the video and stay informed to events right after they happen according to my priorities (not a major news agency) and according to when I wake up.
Another, less journalistic, realization of this vision. I'm at a bar, talking to someone about a vlog that provides a different portrait of an ice skater everyweek. I'm not interested in ice skating, but my high school buddy has become a olympic skater, and would love to see the episdoe that he is on. I subscribe, forget the whole conversation and then suddenly get a buzz a month later at home when a tag with my friends name triggers an alert.
Besides vlogging, radio documentary, and the possiblility for organization on a shoestring (flash mobs) has been enabled by certain automation technologies. Our awareness is heightened, our consciousness changed. Audiences open up, and documentors find their audiences automatically.
I imagine that using twitter-like technologies one could, quite optionally, have whatever they were watching automatically set as their status message skipping the manual question of "what are you doing/watching."
Vlogging is the best suited current form of new media for documentary, and while vlogs have different sub-categories that distinguish them as yet more different media forms, all vlogs can be subscribed to. Subscribing to a vlog is the closest thing I've experienced to the concept of automatic alertness documentary. My open email tab rings at me as I spend the morning scanning my favorite news feeds. I link the link to a new tab to see my favorite vlog covering current developments in the Bloomberg mayoral campaign has posted a new video of protesters outside of city hall. I watch the video and stay informed to events right after they happen according to my priorities (not a major news agency) and according to when I wake up.
Another, less journalistic, realization of this vision. I'm at a bar, talking to someone about a vlog that provides a different portrait of an ice skater everyweek. I'm not interested in ice skating, but my high school buddy has become a olympic skater, and would love to see the episdoe that he is on. I subscribe, forget the whole conversation and then suddenly get a buzz a month later at home when a tag with my friends name triggers an alert.
Besides vlogging, radio documentary, and the possiblility for organization on a shoestring (flash mobs) has been enabled by certain automation technologies. Our awareness is heightened, our consciousness changed. Audiences open up, and documentors find their audiences automatically.
I imagine that using twitter-like technologies one could, quite optionally, have whatever they were watching automatically set as their status message skipping the manual question of "what are you doing/watching."
II: The Technology Gap
The "ever-closing technology gap" is what separates early adapters to automatic alertness strategies from gaining their full audience. The thing that makes closing of this gap so crucial to the spread of new media literacy, is that once automated alertness becomes the standard by which we live by, the technology gap will virtually ceese to exist. When it becomes common to recieve our critical information (as deemed by the individual) automatically, and be reminded automatically we will have no disconnect.
An instant example, your elderly neighbor who dosen't still quite understand how to check her email, or perhaps choses to do so only very rarely when she is expecting something from her family. As web-savy generations grow, this problem will occur less, but even if it didn't once automatic alertness becomes the standard, there will be nothing to check, any piece of information that is categorically deemed urgent enough to be sent automatically will forgo the manual steps were techological mishandling and forgettfulness can occur.
An instant example, your elderly neighbor who dosen't still quite understand how to check her email, or perhaps choses to do so only very rarely when she is expecting something from her family. As web-savy generations grow, this problem will occur less, but even if it didn't once automatic alertness becomes the standard, there will be nothing to check, any piece of information that is categorically deemed urgent enough to be sent automatically will forgo the manual steps were techological mishandling and forgettfulness can occur.
I: Automated vs. Manual Alertness
The phrase "paying attention" implies that beyond just our time, focus is an asset. For us media producers, viewership, or name recognition (popular types of attention) are the fruits of our labor. Media marketers have always used forms of advertisements that attempt to invade an audience's awareness. We see their messages before we can look away. The pop-up ad (which has all but been eliminated by current web-browsers pop-up blocking software), was the culmination of forced automatic awareness (sometimes disguised as being urgent enough to enjoy the distinction of an alertness instead of what ads really produce, awareness at best). Before you know what the website you want to look at looks like, an ad invades the screen, forcing your attention on it for the time it takes to close its window.
For new media documentors who don't have an advertising budget automatic awareness relies on the more noble approach of targeting a potentially interested audience, but in doing so i believe documentary must follow the emergent trends in automatic alertness. One of the first steps in tracking the ways in which we can practice these sort of techniques is to identify the paradigm shift between manual alertness and automatic alertness.
Manual alerts are sent through channels that force the recipient to seek out the alert, even with the slightest effort. Let's take the example of the alarm clock. The alarm clock seems like an automatic alert, because it sonically alerts us to something when we may be unaware that it is going to happen (sleep, distractions). I don't consider this automatic alertness, since it was set manually at one point. The difference is agency. Using this logic, a website that requires agency to visit is one that is provides manual alertness. All documentary films required agency to watch, whether in a theatre or on video, an audience had to "do something" to get the message within. New media documentors could find a way to avoid this necessity for an audiences agency with potentially exciting results.
Another quick distinction, let's say something automatically appears in front of you giving you a link do a new piece of a work of documentary you had explored. You could argue that it takes agency to click the link, prompting the video. I disagree. I would analogize this to watching a movie on the airplane. You are provided with headphones, a screen and a movie, basically given two options: watch or ignore. This isn't agency it's a choice. With a manual alertness media type the choices are broader than watch or ignore. The very selection of a single documentary, or subject matter is one of a perplexing multitude of possibilities.
The new media concept of subscription is another grey area that i believe requires some distinction. If you subscribe to someones web page and are sent mail every time it is updated, could this be considered automated, even thought it required your initial agency to chose the web page? I still believe it is because you have no idea when or what you will receive. Unlike the alarm clock example (and magazines) the audience has no control once they initialize the process. The only control they have that can prevent subscription is cancellation (ideally) or to be receiving their alerts through channels that are checked manually (email programs that don't have constant connectivity and alerts for received messages. This technological gap will rely on users to automate their alerts by installing such automation systems, but i predict that it will be come standard on all portable connectivity (and most home connectivity) devices, as audiences grow accustom to automated alerts. Consequently, this will make new media that requires any sort of agency to find obsolete (and hence fetishized for nostalgia and its increasing rarity).
For new media documentors who don't have an advertising budget automatic awareness relies on the more noble approach of targeting a potentially interested audience, but in doing so i believe documentary must follow the emergent trends in automatic alertness. One of the first steps in tracking the ways in which we can practice these sort of techniques is to identify the paradigm shift between manual alertness and automatic alertness.
Manual alerts are sent through channels that force the recipient to seek out the alert, even with the slightest effort. Let's take the example of the alarm clock. The alarm clock seems like an automatic alert, because it sonically alerts us to something when we may be unaware that it is going to happen (sleep, distractions). I don't consider this automatic alertness, since it was set manually at one point. The difference is agency. Using this logic, a website that requires agency to visit is one that is provides manual alertness. All documentary films required agency to watch, whether in a theatre or on video, an audience had to "do something" to get the message within. New media documentors could find a way to avoid this necessity for an audiences agency with potentially exciting results.
Another quick distinction, let's say something automatically appears in front of you giving you a link do a new piece of a work of documentary you had explored. You could argue that it takes agency to click the link, prompting the video. I disagree. I would analogize this to watching a movie on the airplane. You are provided with headphones, a screen and a movie, basically given two options: watch or ignore. This isn't agency it's a choice. With a manual alertness media type the choices are broader than watch or ignore. The very selection of a single documentary, or subject matter is one of a perplexing multitude of possibilities.
The new media concept of subscription is another grey area that i believe requires some distinction. If you subscribe to someones web page and are sent mail every time it is updated, could this be considered automated, even thought it required your initial agency to chose the web page? I still believe it is because you have no idea when or what you will receive. Unlike the alarm clock example (and magazines) the audience has no control once they initialize the process. The only control they have that can prevent subscription is cancellation (ideally) or to be receiving their alerts through channels that are checked manually (email programs that don't have constant connectivity and alerts for received messages. This technological gap will rely on users to automate their alerts by installing such automation systems, but i predict that it will be come standard on all portable connectivity (and most home connectivity) devices, as audiences grow accustom to automated alerts. Consequently, this will make new media that requires any sort of agency to find obsolete (and hence fetishized for nostalgia and its increasing rarity).
Monday, December 1, 2008
Introduction: What is Automatic Alertness?
A central and misunderstood concept in emerging media and documentary practice is that those with the least access to critically important messages are often those who lack the intrest or resoruces to recieve them. How can we close this gap? I believe it is being closed automatically, as new media follows new generations into standardization, but we can also hasten this process through use of "Automatic Alertness" technologies. As we do this we must remain careful not to undermine our mission as documentors, by intruding upon ones inailiable right to remain uninformed.
One of the most important phenomenons in the networked society is that we can get crucial news faster than pre-digital documentors could possibly hope to arrange even a crude piece. Through blogs, wikis and online news services, we are allowed unprecedented access to alerts and information. Through even newer technologies, such as twitters, rss, and txt message "alerts." Although it seems unfortunately rare, this ability to tab into our very alertness is occasionally used for something important to our survival. Let's take the local example: New School Alerts.
New School Alerts uses a concept I've named "Automated Alerts" to warn students of anything that could interupt their attendance at school. New School Alerts uses a three front attack (cell-phone, landlines, and email) to alert students of major events that could cause problems comming to school. The reason the alerts work, is because they are able to surmount the technological barriers that prevent some users from benefiting from such saftey measures. All you need to do is register and you are automatically alerted. In fact, when the system was first implemented registration was actually required for all students. Although this may seem like an intrusion, few could dispute the advantges of being alerted before cluelessly wandering into a messy situation such as an act of terrorism or a natural disaster, when trying to attend classes, or more practically showing up to find the school closed due to unforseen events. New School Alerts hasn't fallen victim to misuse or overuse. We don't recieve messages for minor closures, and it is never used for advertisement. Like emergency channels of the past (911) New School Alerts is taken with enough seriousness that it remains a channel of alertness.
The World Health Organization has used an online database known as Epidemic and Pandemic Alert Response (EPR) since 1996, to track epidemics of infectious disease. The database is updates frequently and generally considered the best resource for precautious travelers (it is endorsed by the US Department of State's Travel website (which also has a simalar news feed, which posted travel alerts regarding Mumbai two days after the terrorism their on the 26th). The WHO resource has an RSS that can be subscribed to, but lacks the required automation of New School Alerts. This posses an ethical question: Should emergency information sent to you be required? Does the potential good justify the intrusion?
Let's think about how the Hurricane Katrina disaster could have been minimized if everyone in New Oreleans recieved text messages instantly updating them on the storms surprisingly increasing severity. Would lives have been saved? I doubt anyone would have complained about an intrusion in such a case. There is a comprehensive hurricane resource and tracking page on the state department's website, as well as on FEMA's, but when your caught in a storm you're less likely to think about logging on before "batting down the hatches." Also the crux of my argument against current uses of attention grabbing in new media documentary: These alerts ellude the very people who could from them most, due to a lack of access to technology, ineptude in putting it to practical use, or simply underestimating it's usefulness.
For a new media documentor automatic alerts are a possibility for "attention getting," but remain problematic due to a lack of percieved urgency in a documentors message. Exposing a child prostitution ring in India makes an interesting subject for a documentary (Born in Brothels), and to the children forced into such a life establishing a sense of urgency akin to a hurricane in a viewers backyard is impossible. Ergo, it is unlikely that being would find any sort of imposed alerts urging them to watch fresh, independatly produced documentaries on a famine in Africa, genocide in the former Yugoslavia or civil war in Burma to be anything but invasive, unless they voluntarily sign up for such news. This brings us back to the question that sparked my thinking: How do we get people to pay attention to what we produce as documentors?
On the surface, it is a question of urgency, urgency is the ultimate way to shuffle prioritizaiton. Even people who whimsically subscribe to RSS feeders, will re-examine the ones they check daily based on perceived urgency. Beyond that, how do we get our debatably urgent messages to people who aren't even comfortable with this technology?
I think the cell phone is the best tool in both cases. Even most people who have never subscribed to an RSS reader have gotten text message alerts on their cell phones. Maybe they purposely texted a short message to a number to recieve something like a daily horroscope or movie updates, perhaps they got an important emergecny message from a school they attend or a company they work for. These aren't considered spam messages or advertisements because they are welcomed, useful and even urgent. For those who are more tech-knowledable, text messages have the personal touch that RSS feeds lack, and automatically alert an audience better than any known method (short of the conviecable cybernetic implants of the near future).
So the quesiton now is, how do we get people to let us into their cell phones. As I mentioned in my thesis, the gap between effort and attention is closing automatically through the connectivity of our cell phone technologies. It is becoming more commonplace for new users to remain connected to the internet through their mobile phones, opening up tools such as twitter and RSS feeds for remote attention grabbing. This requires no action by documentors, it can only be noticed and examined by those who study "automatic alertness" as a sign that soon information seeking will be slowly supplemented and replaced by the information finding you (sounds like a Yakov Smirnov joke...). In the meantime, documentors can attempt to make the alertness of their audience more automatic.
What strikes me as the biggest change in documentary practice between documentors that use new and old media is that "the new documentary" is closer to journalism in that it is a process rather than a product. Instead of making a media product which becomes an artifact as it ages, we are making vlogs, film series (webisodes) and projects that require audience participation (mirroring a conversation), which require periodic bursts of attention, and users being updated on additions to the process of documentation.
It is a lot to ask of our audience to manually revisit documentary projects throughout the process of events, so it is our job as documentors to use automatic alertness techniques to keep our audience engaged. I want use this blog, as a form of documentation, to explore implementation and advancement of automatic alertness techniques and technologies.
One of the most important phenomenons in the networked society is that we can get crucial news faster than pre-digital documentors could possibly hope to arrange even a crude piece. Through blogs, wikis and online news services, we are allowed unprecedented access to alerts and information. Through even newer technologies, such as twitters, rss, and txt message "alerts." Although it seems unfortunately rare, this ability to tab into our very alertness is occasionally used for something important to our survival. Let's take the local example: New School Alerts.
New School Alerts uses a concept I've named "Automated Alerts" to warn students of anything that could interupt their attendance at school. New School Alerts uses a three front attack (cell-phone, landlines, and email) to alert students of major events that could cause problems comming to school. The reason the alerts work, is because they are able to surmount the technological barriers that prevent some users from benefiting from such saftey measures. All you need to do is register and you are automatically alerted. In fact, when the system was first implemented registration was actually required for all students. Although this may seem like an intrusion, few could dispute the advantges of being alerted before cluelessly wandering into a messy situation such as an act of terrorism or a natural disaster, when trying to attend classes, or more practically showing up to find the school closed due to unforseen events. New School Alerts hasn't fallen victim to misuse or overuse. We don't recieve messages for minor closures, and it is never used for advertisement. Like emergency channels of the past (911) New School Alerts is taken with enough seriousness that it remains a channel of alertness.
The World Health Organization has used an online database known as Epidemic and Pandemic Alert Response (EPR) since 1996, to track epidemics of infectious disease. The database is updates frequently and generally considered the best resource for precautious travelers (it is endorsed by the US Department of State's Travel website (which also has a simalar news feed, which posted travel alerts regarding Mumbai two days after the terrorism their on the 26th). The WHO resource has an RSS that can be subscribed to, but lacks the required automation of New School Alerts. This posses an ethical question: Should emergency information sent to you be required? Does the potential good justify the intrusion?
Let's think about how the Hurricane Katrina disaster could have been minimized if everyone in New Oreleans recieved text messages instantly updating them on the storms surprisingly increasing severity. Would lives have been saved? I doubt anyone would have complained about an intrusion in such a case. There is a comprehensive hurricane resource and tracking page on the state department's website, as well as on FEMA's, but when your caught in a storm you're less likely to think about logging on before "batting down the hatches." Also the crux of my argument against current uses of attention grabbing in new media documentary: These alerts ellude the very people who could from them most, due to a lack of access to technology, ineptude in putting it to practical use, or simply underestimating it's usefulness.
For a new media documentor automatic alerts are a possibility for "attention getting," but remain problematic due to a lack of percieved urgency in a documentors message. Exposing a child prostitution ring in India makes an interesting subject for a documentary (Born in Brothels), and to the children forced into such a life establishing a sense of urgency akin to a hurricane in a viewers backyard is impossible. Ergo, it is unlikely that being would find any sort of imposed alerts urging them to watch fresh, independatly produced documentaries on a famine in Africa, genocide in the former Yugoslavia or civil war in Burma to be anything but invasive, unless they voluntarily sign up for such news. This brings us back to the question that sparked my thinking: How do we get people to pay attention to what we produce as documentors?
On the surface, it is a question of urgency, urgency is the ultimate way to shuffle prioritizaiton. Even people who whimsically subscribe to RSS feeders, will re-examine the ones they check daily based on perceived urgency. Beyond that, how do we get our debatably urgent messages to people who aren't even comfortable with this technology?
I think the cell phone is the best tool in both cases. Even most people who have never subscribed to an RSS reader have gotten text message alerts on their cell phones. Maybe they purposely texted a short message to a number to recieve something like a daily horroscope or movie updates, perhaps they got an important emergecny message from a school they attend or a company they work for. These aren't considered spam messages or advertisements because they are welcomed, useful and even urgent. For those who are more tech-knowledable, text messages have the personal touch that RSS feeds lack, and automatically alert an audience better than any known method (short of the conviecable cybernetic implants of the near future).
So the quesiton now is, how do we get people to let us into their cell phones. As I mentioned in my thesis, the gap between effort and attention is closing automatically through the connectivity of our cell phone technologies. It is becoming more commonplace for new users to remain connected to the internet through their mobile phones, opening up tools such as twitter and RSS feeds for remote attention grabbing. This requires no action by documentors, it can only be noticed and examined by those who study "automatic alertness" as a sign that soon information seeking will be slowly supplemented and replaced by the information finding you (sounds like a Yakov Smirnov joke...). In the meantime, documentors can attempt to make the alertness of their audience more automatic.
What strikes me as the biggest change in documentary practice between documentors that use new and old media is that "the new documentary" is closer to journalism in that it is a process rather than a product. Instead of making a media product which becomes an artifact as it ages, we are making vlogs, film series (webisodes) and projects that require audience participation (mirroring a conversation), which require periodic bursts of attention, and users being updated on additions to the process of documentation.
It is a lot to ask of our audience to manually revisit documentary projects throughout the process of events, so it is our job as documentors to use automatic alertness techniques to keep our audience engaged. I want use this blog, as a form of documentation, to explore implementation and advancement of automatic alertness techniques and technologies.
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