Meerkat
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/17/meerkat-live-video-future-of-reporting?CMP=share_btn_tw
New Digital and Internet
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/11/gaming-the-news-why-todays-hack-events-are-tomorrows-headlines
http://mashable.com/2015/03/17/sxsw-internet-irl/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link
http://mashable.com/2015/03/16/ex-machina-tinder-marketing/
Karl Marx
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their identity but their
social being that determines their consciousness.” – Your identity is defined
by social forces – e.g. class, status etc
Freud
“You” are defined by your previous experiences and subconscious desires. Your
core identity is hidden from your conscience mind.
We are only aware of a
very small part of what makes up our personality; most of what we are is buried
and inaccessible.
Gillles Deleuze
“You” as a concept is unstable and ‘schizophrenic’. You are an ongoing project.
Mikhail
Bakhtin
The Russian
philosopher Bakhtin believed that individual people cannot be finalized,
completely understood, known or labeled. He saw identity as the unfinalised
self meaning a person is never fully revealed or known.
This ties in
with the idea that identity is a fluid concept, a life-long project that is
never complete.
Paul Ricouer
The Narrative Self - ‘You’ are a fictional character created to take part in
the ‘story’ of you life.
David Gauntlett (Media, Gender and Identity)
'It is the
case that the construction of identity has become a known requirement. Modern
Western societies does not leave individuals in any doubt that they need to
make choices of identity and lifestyle - even if their preferred options are
rather obvious and conventional ones, or are limited due to lack of financial
(or cultural) resources. As the sociologist Ulrich Beck has noted - everyone
wants to 'live their own life,' but this is, at the same time 'an experimental
life'.'
Today we're bombarded with ideas about - being yourself, standing out or finding your place - we're encourage to define our existence in terms of what buy, do, earn money from or enjoy. Obviously finding an 'identity' is problematic especially when so many existing identities and roles are uncertain - think gender roles, career stability, upward mobility in class. So Beck is saying that we experiment with 'identities' to see what fits, works and is comfortable. And Gauntlett continues:
'Your life is your project - there is no escape. The media provides some of the tools which can be used in this work. Like many toolkit, however, it contains some good utensils and some useless ones; some that might give beauty to the project and some that might spoil it.'
One of the tools in this 'toolkit' is personalities and characters in the media that could act as 'role models'
'The role model remains an important concept, although it should not be taken to mean someone that a person wants to copy. Instead, role models serve as navigation points as individuals steer their own personal routes through life.'
Gauntlett explain the power relationship between the media and the audience:
'The power relationship between the media and the audience involves a 'bit of both' or to be more precise, a lot of both. The media sends out a huge number of messages about identity and acceptable forms of self-expression, gender, sexuality, and lifestyle. At the same time the public have their own even more robust set of diverse feelings on the issues. The media's suggestions may be seductive but can never simply overpower contrary feelings in the audience.'
Sheldon
Stryker
We interact
with others to create an identity, this is called identity negotiation. This
develops a consistent set of behaviours that reinforce the identity of the
person or group. This behaviour then become social expectations.
This is
particularly relevant for collective identities (especially sub-cultures) that
develop a specific way of relating to each other (attitude, language, ideas)
that goes some way to helping construct our identity.
Judith
Butler
Butler says:
'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is
performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to
be its results.' In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you
do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are. The idea behind
this is our identity (specifically here gender identity) is not defined by
biology but is actually a performance learned as we grow. As media students we
can apply to our study of identity as many of these performances and notions of
idenity will be learned from the media.
Thomas de Zengotita
InMediated: The Hidden Effects
of the Media on You and Your World he asserts that almost everything
(info, values, news, role models) comes to us through some media (TV, print,
web, magazines, films) so will undoubtedly colour/influence our view of life
and therefore our own self-definition.
Jacques Lacan - Mirror Stage (we form ourselves by identifying with other images)
‘Lacan's
concept of the mirror stage was strongly inspired by earlier work by
psychologist Henri Wallon, who speculated based on observations of animals and
humans responding to their reflections in mirrors. Wallon noted that by the age
of about six months, human infants and chimpanzees could both recognize their
reflection in a mirror. While chimpanzees rapidly lose interest in the
discovery, human infants typically become very interested and devote much time
and effort to exploring the connections between their bodies and their images.
In a 1931 paper, Wallon argued that mirrors helped children develop a sense of
self-identity.’
Althusser's Interpellation
Here's one
definition. And here's an attempt to explain it: Interpellation is the process
where a human subject is constructed by pre-given structures. This has been
taken up some media theorists to to explain how media texts impose their
ideology (their set of ideas) on the audience. If you think about it, we're
bombarded by messages from the media, messages that make certain assumptions
about us (taste, place in society etc), and as soon as we engage with the
message we are positioned as a 'subject' rather than an individual. The idea is
that we are controlled by these messages and go some way to defining our identity.
Judith
Butler's Performativity
Butler says:
'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is
performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to
be its results.' In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you
do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are. The idea behind
this is our identity (specifically here gender identity) is not defined by
biology but is actually a performance learned as we grow.
COLLECTIVE
The concept
of a collective identity refers to a set of individuals' sense of belonging to
the group or collective. For the individual, the identity derived from the
collective shapes a part of his or her personal identity. It is possible, at times,
that this sense of belonging to a particular group will be so strong that it
will trump other aspects of the person's personal identity.’
Collective
Identity.net
‘A
collective identity may have been first constructed by outsiders who may still
enforce it, but depends on some acceptance by those to whom it is applied.
Collective identities are expressed in cultural materials – names, narratives,
symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing.’
Francesca
Poletta, James M Jasper, Collective Identity and Social Movements
‘Although
there is no consensual definition of collective identity, discussions of the
concept invariably suggest that its essence resides in a shared sense of
‘one-ness’ or ‘we-ness’ anchored in real or imagined shared attributes and
experiences among those who comprise the collectivity and in relation or
contrast to one or more actual imagined sets of ‘others’.
David Snow,
Collective Identity and Expressive Form
Quotes from David Gauntlett (Media, Gender and Identity)
'It is the case
that the construction of identity has become a known requirement. Modern
Western societies does not leave individuals in any doubt that they need to
make choices of identity and lifestyle - even if their preferred options are
rather obvious and conventional ones, or are limited due to lack of financial
(or cultural) resources. As the sociologist Ulrich Beck has noted - everyone
wants to 'live their own life,' but this is, at the same time 'an experimental
life'.
'Your life is your project - there is no escape. The media provides some of the tools which can be used in this work. Like many toolkit, however, it contains some good utensils and some useless ones; some that might give beauty to the project and some that might spoil it.'
'The role model remains an important concept, although it should not be taken to mean someone that a person wants to copy. Instead, role models serve as navigation points as individuals steer their own personal routes through life.'
'The power relationship between the media and the audience
involves a 'bit of both' or to be more precise, a lot of both. The media sends
out a huge number of messages about identity and acceptable forms of
self-expression, gender, sexuality, and lifestyle. At the same time the public
have their own even more robust set of diverse feelings on the issues. The
media's suggestions may be seductive but can never simply overpower contrary
feelings in the audience.'
How dare we be so beautiful?!
On the teenager portraits of Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier.
http://tacohiddebakker.com/texts/how-dare-we-be-so-beautiful/
An androgynous character dressed in white shoes, jeans, and a nearly half-open black shirt sits relaxed and slightly leaning forward by a tiny pond in a garden, posing for a photograph. (S)he is looking downwards at his/her mirror image, reflected from the surface of the water. This image, in its general composition not quite unlike Caravaggio’s painting depicting an actively forward-leaning Narcissus, offers some clues about a giant photographic enterprise which resulted in a multimedia installation named Double Extension Beauty Tubes, combining still and moving images with a soundtrack, and a hefty paper volume called Neue Menschen (New People).
Collaborating with teenagers over the course of almost three years from 2008 until early 2011, Swiss photographer duo Rico Scagliola (1985) and Michael Meier (1982) had accumulated a vast archive of about 8,000 photographs, showing a cross-section of some of the more extravagant stylish expressions of teens’ subcultures of the day. According to Rico & Michael, henceforth colloquially calling them like they call themselves via their web site, in an introductory video they produced for the book, it shall be a testimony to the love affair of today’s teenagers’ real and virtual lives. Their cultural life is very much colored by pop and underground music, film, fashion, and the internet. Glimpses of the backgrounds and stages of their daily lives can be seen in some of the photographs; IKEA-styled suburban middle-class homes and poster-ridden bedrooms.
Feeling that somehow they had missed out on their own youth, Rico & Michael started making friends with teenagers and photograph them the way they would like to see themselves and want to be seen. Through film and photography, clearly. Starting to photograph Emos who were hanging out at and around the main railway station of Zurich every night, other youngsters belonging to neighbouring subcultures (Goths, Punks, Indies, Metalheads et cet) were soon to follow. The different groups were blending easily together, and some people would change styles as if changing clothes. Youth subcultures are not as clearly distinct anymore like they were in pre-internet times.
Rico & Michael sensed that the newest generation of teenagers was being dismissed as not having a proper voice of their own. But do people in the midst of the transformation from children to adults ever really have a voice of their own? Adolescence is one of the most formative stages in the lives of human beings for the discovery and development of a voice of one’s own. However, in the technologically advanced world, today’s young generations (often called “digital natives”) are being born into fast-paced digital times, in which developing a vision on the creation and dissemination of images of one’s own is equally important to – if not more important than – the formation of a unique and opinionated voice on real life and public events. Many of the adolescents who were portrayed by Rico & Michael are astoundingly mature in their skills of posing for cameras. In their virtual universes they are masters of masquerade and disguise. They have an almost inborn talent for staging and for compository framing. The boundaries demarcating what is real and what is fictitious are more fluid than ever before. This perhaps being one of the reasons for the disavowal of the new people by older generations (the “analog natives”). Today’s children and teenagers demand to be seen rather than to be heard. Visual style is everything.
Whereas the mythological Narcissus was not aware that he was merely gazing at his mirrored self-portrait, today’s image-saturated youth is very well aware of the carefully constructed artificiality of their reflected myriad selves. The iGeneration falls in love (or tries to do so) with their transformed selves inspired by the appearances of fashionable pop stars (Lady Gaga to whom Neue Menschen is dedicated being the most important), or with their new selves collaged together from bits and pieces found within the gargantuan digital image junk heap. Unlike Narcissus, they fall in love with faces that they recognize as theirs although they have been consciously transformed into other temporary identities. For many of the teenagers who are maturing during the times of facebook and flickr playful metamorphosis and sharing photographs thereof becomes a proof of their existence. This encompasses a self-consciousness that is literally a form of ex-istence – a being out of oneself.
Modern life is one of the best subjects for photography, according to photo-critic Gerry Badger, albeit being a subject that quickly fades into history.(1) Rather than playing the snake biting its tail (photography reacting on other art or photography), photographers make more interesting work when they turn their lenses outward. And what subject could be more intriguing and ambiguous than the teenagers of the image-saturated online age. Photographing teenagers with such a keen visual aptitude means both an inward and an outward turning of the lens. It is a focus on real people as they imagine themselves based on images of other real people.
As quickly as an actual subject may fade into history, it fades into nothing if there is no history to be made through imaginative documentation. A sensitive, imaginative, and collaborative documentary approach is one of the strengths of Rico & Michael’s portrayal of the teenagers. The photographers wanted to blur any clear distinction between their roles as authors and their subject’s roles as models. The kids were as much involved in the image-making process as the photographers, and when they had not yet conceived of how exactly they wanted to be photographed, Rico & Michael would stage and picture them in ways they deemed fitting to their respective self-perceptions. The series is not a documentary about teenage subcultures per se. Most importantly it is about today’s teenagers’ visual awareness, their fashions as an essence of their self-consciousness and their aptitude of cultivating self-images. In Rico & Michael’s words their project is a documentation of “the construction of [the teenagers’] pictured identity.”(2) It is a photographic document of the new generation’s inborn talent for mise-en-scène, for their talents for the staging of oneself as another.
The subversive somewhat provocative undertone of the otherwise tautological title Neue Menschen (the youngest generation is new per definition, physically at least) suggests that teenagers nowadays are somehow radically different in comparison to earlier generations. Is it the hypermedial online world basically informing them from birth on which accounts for this difference? Every change in technology changes the way people behave and interact with each other, and faster changes in technology tend to provoke quicker generation shifts. But in digital wonderland we are all too young still to already come to serious conclusions on this matter. Rico & Michael want to have their book title sound like a big and bold statement and at the same time clarifying that it deals with a contemporary subject. Its actual actuality may be part of history soon, the fantasized photo-selves in Neue Menschen will be forever young. Photographs don’t age any longer and fashion styles are part of an eternal cycle of renewal.
When asked about the importance of documenting the cultures of today’s teenagers, Lauren A. Wright, who in 2011 curated a large exhibition on twentieth-century youth cultures, had an admirable answer: “I think it’s always important to recognize the huge influence of teenagers on our culture past and present, particularly in light of the ambivalent place they occupy. We really do both love and loathe them.”(3) Young people can teach us as much as older generations can teach them. As long as we stay open and never forget about our younger selves within our older selves. In the end, all that Rico & Michael ask from us is to love the kids they portrayed with careful attention and love themselves. If we can’t embrace every teenager around for real, the least we can do is to immerse ourselves for a moment in the fantastic though often dark imagery in which teens show off their roles and their uncertain identities. A praise stronger and more concise than the following comment on a picture that’s up at one of the photographer’s facebook-pages is hardly possible: Luv it pic!
IDENTITY AND SOCIAL MEDIA
‘Convergence does not occur through media appliances, however sophisticated
they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers
and through their social interactions with others.”
Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information
extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we
make sense of our everyday lives.’
Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture)
‘We interact with others to create an identity. This is called
identity negotiation. This develops a consistent set of behaviours that
reinforce the identity of the person or group. These behaviours then become
social expectations”.
Stella Ting-Toomey