Psycho-geography

In our workshops we were recently presented with the idea of psycho-geography. "Pyscho-what?" was my first reaction to the idea - as I had never heard of it before. After some discussion in class, as well as research, I discovered a good definition of it as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Whilst this definition is a bit wordy, it does cover the main point of psycho-geography - seeing an environment in a different way, so that its effect on behavior and emotions can be found.

One way of doing this simply is by taking a stroll through a place you are familiar with, but by taking a different route to normal. By doing this, you are likely to notice new and interesting things that one would not have otherwise seen. This is a simple way of implementing psycho-geography and is one that we were asked to follow in class.

Within my group, we originally decided to take a walk that mapped out the acronym "LOL" on a map of Leicester, but after starting our walk, our attentions wandered and so we just decided to spontaneously walk in a new direction after a certain distance. This random nature of the walk captured the idea of psycho-geography well in my opinion as it allowed us to truly discover Leicester in an individual way as we were looking at it through fresh eyes, due to the random way in which our walk was conducted.

Here is the result of our walk on a modified Google Map:

View The Magic Lizard Crawl in a larger map

By using this map, it related our walk back to digital media and showed how a simple project like this psycho-geography one, can be integrated totally within the digital world. Whilst our outcome was simple - we used a Google map with images pinned to it - it could have been much more complex due to the wide variety of websites available. Had we wanted to be more detailed, we could have uploaded video at each location to a site like YouTube or Vimeo. Had we wanted to record sound at locations we could have used AudioBoo. The possibilities are endless for doing this kind of task - and if done on a large scale could have a profound effect on people.

I think psycho-geography is a clever idea, and is one that is open to much development and interactivity in a digital age. When it was originally realised, photography was the only true form of doing a project like this, but thanks to the era that we are living in, pyscho-geography can be so much more. It can transform somewhere mundane into somewhere new. It can allow residents of areas to see their hometowns in new lights, and it can allow tourists to see just what a place has to offer.

Whilst my group may have done a fairly simple project - I think we showed how even a random stroll through town can provide an interesting viewpoint on the place in which we all live and work - something I believe is the aim of psycho-geography.

References:

Introduction to a critique of urban geography, 1955

Remix Culture - The Muppets sing Bohemian Rhapsody

After discussing and learning a bit about remix culture over the last couple of weeks, and thinking that a lot of the stuff that has been made is, quite frankly genius, I then discovered this amazing video about ten minutes ago.

While it's not as much a part of remix culture as things like the Hitler Downfall videos, it shows how even the world's biggest and most loved production companies can take part and make something their own. Just thought I'd share it as a good example...

Here are The Muppets, doing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody in a very special way:



(Oh, and just as a side note, at the time of writing, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the 4th largest trending topic on Twitter because of this - just shows how quickly things can go viral!)

UPDATE (25/11 @ 3pm) - When I embedded the video on here, it had about 500 views on YouTube. In under 24 hours it has now broken the 1million views mark. This really shows how quickly videos can go viral!

Week 6 - Presentations...

So, this week we presented our, well, presentations on Web 2.0. Our group's chosen title was Rich User Expriences in Web 2.0 and here is the presentation. It was a Pecha Kucha presentation and so each slide lasted for 20 seconds:

Rich User Experiences in Web 2.0

View more presentations from lolscott.

In this presentation, we covered the 'rich user experiences' which make Web 2.0 so different and more user-involved than the Internet of the past. We centered this discussion mainly on social networking sites - as these are the most popular user experiences which people take part in. Even though these are now taken as a standard part of day-to-day life, they are always evolving and borrowing from each other in order to become the richest experience for their users. This user involvement gives people a sense of belonging, and makes us believe that the website truly cares about us as an individual person.

Despite this, slide 2 showed how sites like Facebook are not actually made for the user, but for the administrators needs - something proven by the vast amounts of groups and pages calling for Facebook to be changed or altered in some way. This is strangely another form of rich user experience as it allows the users to feel involved in the websites running. Also connected to this is the notion that Twitter can be seen as the medium of protest - in the way that it connects people very quickly through a small amount of communication.

We then discussed how these websites encourage networking through the use of social games - something which on a secondary level allows people to develop and earn money from the users of the site. This lead us onto the discussion of 'free labour in a web 2.0 world' - something which is related directly to the many thousands of applications developed specifically for sites like Twitter which create a more immersive experience for users, but often to not pocket the developers much money at all. This works well for the user - as it creates a richer experience - as well as the website itself - as it creates more attention and user activity. This free labour works on a more personal level too - and it covers things as simple as reporting a user on MySpace or tagging photos on Facebook or Flickr.

Whilst I have said that websites do not work for their users, but for their admins - it is true that the sites do actually go some way to incorporate ideas from their users, as well as respond directly to user feedback on new features. This is something that applies to modern day internet programs as well such as Adobe Flash and Adobe Air.

We reflected on all this by concluding with some key points. Social networking sites are the most important form of rich user experience in Web 2.0 and these allow people to interact with each other and provide people with a more interactive experience on the Internet. As these are free to access (on the whole) it means that we, as users, tend to spend a lot of time on them - something that is definitely true for me and my friends! These sites rely on people like me spending lots of time on them and hopefully then using my free time to give them free labour - via tagging, reporting, or even developing for the websites.

I think that this presentation covered why social networking websites are the archetypal form of rich user experience and provided examples of this - as well as the key idea of free labour.

Week 4 - Impression Management

This week's reading was Danah Boyd's article on "Why Youth Heart Myspace." This provided a great insight into the reasons that people use social networking websites and what they get out of them - it also led to some interesting discussions in class about this text and what the various things contained inside it meant. Something that particularly interested me was Boyd's interpretations and thoughts on impression management. She mentions "self-reflexivity, self-monitoring and imagining an audience" as being crucial to this impression management and after exploring this within both the online and offline worlds, it provides an interesting point of discussion.

Impression management is defined as being "part of a larger process where people seek to define a situation through their behaviour," or simply that people act in a certain way which is deemed socially acceptable in order to gain the acceptance of the people around them, and thus leave a positive impression. Both online and offline, we all use impression management and adapt socially in different situations, but it is those online interactions which can be much more controlled and tweaked in specific ways in order to impress or show off features about you which you want to use to fit in, or be liked for.

Whilst Boyd talked about MySpace in her article, in class we discussed Facebook - as it is much more widely used now than MySpace is. Whilst Facebook is lacking the extreme customisation that MySpace had on its profiles (through the entire page design being exploited), its uniform profiles mean that impression management has to be done on a more subtle level, through things such as text, profile pictures or the personal information you allow yourself to disclose.

We realised that as we know who our audience (or friends list) is, we know how to act around them and judge what would be seen as a socially acceptable status for example. This kind of impression management shows awareness of our audiences online and lets us control what we say and what people see of us in order to promote the most positive sides of our personalities. The same thing applies for picture tagging. When you see pictures of yourself on Facebook - it is not always a positive idea to tag them, as this may give a negative impression of you or your behaviour. This is something that is becoming increasingly apparent as University admission boards, or workplaces checking applications are starting to use social media to check up on their applicants and make judgemental decisions on them.

There are many, many different ways in which social media like MySpace and Facebook can be manipulated in order to give out the right impression of yourself socially, and thus they cannot all be explained. However, the two above examples combined with what Boyd wrote about in her article provide a great insight into how impression management works, and specifically on the internet. As the internet is providing us all with brand new ways of socially interacting with people, it seems right that we are all adapting to this and using tools such as impression management to keep socialising on the internet a positive thing for ourselves that doesn't end up ruining relationships and so on.

Hello!

Hello!

I am Scott Kelly, 18, and quite obviously studying Media Studies at DMU - which is pretty much why this entire blog thing is here. I don't really know what to write here, though hopefully by the end of the year I will have actually managed to write something decent...

To be honest, I don't really know what else to write so will leave it for now until I can actually come up with a decent blog post!