Last week, last post. Can’t believe this have come to an end. Throwing back my blog posts, I am particularly interested in developing my opinions and ideas on how digital media presenting images and information as well as how we as digital media users present ourselves in the realm of digital media platforms and interfaces. In the last blog post, I would like to stay to explain my last few reflections on the idea of the characters of digital media interfaces and how the technologies or media we interact with not just on a daily basis in reciprocity shaping and influencing the users.
The interfaces we interact with is limited to a rectangle frame (Manovich). Information being presented is limited as well. However, in the era such a notion of ‘big data’ is coming to usage for the algorithm in every company and government department’s data parsing machine. The ‘bigness’ in big data could be represented by so called 4 Vs – volume, variety, velocity, veracity. And these 4 Vs keeps leading us to think upon the idea of the increased scale and scope of information stored in the digital media world. But just as I stated, our human perception of information presented through digital media is limited and framed, then how does the notion of big data blend in with the field of digital media and effect its users?
In the selective perception chasing after the unimaginable totality of information and data, we can not help but lay our focus on the notion of ‘depth’ and ‘width’ in digital media. To think upon the idea of depth and width, first we could go to the intuitive of the using experience of digital media products. The width of a physical digital media technology, for example the mobile phones or laptop, is framed. It is just like a window in an enormous house. Based on the individual interests and connections an individual make, the width of the tech is limited anyway. But for the depth of it, for me, is unlimited. The media is only like an interface in this perspective and it enables the users to mine deeper every time we click a link. It is an ongoing process of this mining. However, this idea of linking in terms of depth leads me to another way of thinking of information stored in ‘big media’. That is , if we pay specific attention to the idea of ‘time’ presented in the information in the nowadays digital media, we could easily spot it is not laying out chronologically. It is obviously that nowadays information tend to draw identical ‘features’ and ‘common grounds’ in relationship to other pieces of information. We less read an article willing to demonstrate is collection of data in a chronological order instead we present it with links, links to similar ideas. In light of this, we could imagine the interfaces of digital media is like a wide and flat map on which all the information takes its own spot. According to Galloway’s idea on the protocol of control, now we tend to see all the info is either a node or a layer in a hierarchical structure but instead the links to one another distributed in the net without having an obvious central hub. This notion of information also calls on users seeing information ‘equally’. And we this generation like to make connection with info and info, gathering and calculating, sorting out ‘categories’ and ‘ labels’. And this, in a way resonances to the idea of ‘big data’ in its purposing of making predictions on certain groups of people/audience/ users. We start to treat ourselves as a calculate-able data or one piece of information. And try to fit in the categories classed by big data.
Big data is like a giant. It stands in front of our houses and we could only see it through the window of the house. We will never know how tall and how big the giant is, but we will make call to our neighbors to puzzle the useful information to think about this giant.
Recent Comments