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You wake up and pick up the post. Its full of junk mail addressed to you (where did they get your name and address!?)
You then turn your mobile on, meaning you are able to be tracked wherever you go.
You then drive to the shop, passing cameras as you go, stepping into the shop ypu find yourself faced with three CCTV cameras.

This is the reality of our society today. As Susanne Lace (2005) states, we are all 'glass consumers'. Others know so much about us, that they can almost see through us. Estimates suggest that the details of the average economically active adult in the developed world are located in around 700 major databases (Davies,2002), and know in 2006, there is one CCTV camera for around every fourteen poeple.

We may find this culture of surveillance controversial, as in a society were we believe that we have freedom and privacy, we are actually being watched and scrutinised over everything that we do. Even more scrutiny and surveillance were introduced after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Personally, as I dont have anything to hide, I dont particularly mind the huge amounts of surveillance, as it is likely that they are helping to protect us, and keep us safe. Take for instance the recent situations at airports where attempts to hijack planes was supposedly thwarted. This was done by the polce keeping a close surveillance over the possible terrorists.

However, the question is, what if somebody objects to all this surveillance? It doesnt mean that they have anything to hide, it just may be that they value their privacy. However, with the worry people have about terrorists these days, would it mean that this person would be branded as suspicious and a possible terrorist etc, just because they valued their privacy? This is very likely.

Surveillance can also be critisised by the fact that although it is there to protect us, the information is not always correct. In 2003, at least 193 job applicants were wrongly accused of having criminal records.

However, surveillance is not umambiguously good or bad. Although it has its critisms, surveillance is what is responsible for: -making sure we are paid correctly
                                      -making sure we recieve appropriate welfare benifits
                                      -ensuring that terrorism is contained
                                      -means we can be warned about risks to our health
                                      -means that we can vote in elections (electoral role)
                                     - means we can pay by card instead of carrying large
                                       sums of money

Most people would regard these accomplishments as contributing positively to the quality of life. Personally, I believe that aslong as we have nothing to hide, surveillance is a good way to protect us. It does jepordise our privacy greatly, but with the world as it is at the minute, maybe we need this extra protection. As long as the government and police are using it to thwart crime, then it can be seen as a good thing, however, it is the risks of other people getting hold of our information that is the problem, and a worry. I supose I seem to be contradicting myself a bit in this paragraph, but it just proves what a controversial area that this is. At first I thought, that if the police tapped into a terrorists phone, then this was good, as they could get important information to stop an attack. But then I thought, well, this persons phone in which they are tapping in to, is a suspected terrorist! No one has proved they are a terrorist, they might just be an innocent bystander who has been wrongly accussed. The police may be tapping into the phone for the right reasons of that they may be able to stop an attack, but if this person turns out to have nothing to do with it, then they have had there privacy hacked into for no reason, and this is unfair!

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Dolly's arival paved the way for the possibility of human cloning. We watched the film,l 'The 6th Day', a film in which the issue of human cloning is tackled. In this film, the main character Adam meets a clone of himself and stumbles into a grand conspiracy about clones taking over the world. Cloning had been introduced to society, in which you were able to take your dying pet to "Re-Pet, and have it cloned so that it could continue living with you. Human cloning however was not allowed, meaning Adam has to go about trying to destroy the company who cloned him.

 The idea of human cloning is an extremely controversial idea within our society. The American medical association has issued formal public statements advising against human reproductive cloning. They believe that it would be unethical to attempt to clone humans, due to lack of understanding about reproductive cloning and the inefficiency of animal cloning. Dolly died at a young age after being put down due to a lung disease. She also suffered from arthritis. There has been no evidence to prove that these illnesses were a direct cause of being cloned but then again there is no evidence to prove that it was not dues to this! It is expected that the same problems that arise in animal cloning will arise in human cloning. Ashamed as I am to admit it, as I do love animals,  I am not a person who has been overly concerned in the past with animal rights and animal testing. However when people go on about ethical reasons for not trying to clone humans then I think, well surely dont the same sort of ethical reasons apply to animals!? Maybe I am more concerned about animals welfare than I first thought!

An issue has also arrised within the realms of human cloning that we do not know how cloning would impact on mental development. (http://www.orn.gov/sci/techresources/Human_genome/elsi/cloning.shtml#ethics )
For me, this raised the question, 'what would I do if I was able to clone somebody who I loved and bring them back from the dead?'. My first thought would be, ofcourse, if you miss and love somebody then it will be inevitable that you would bring them back if you thought you could. However, I then thought, well if they are not going to have the personality that you no and love, would it be the right thing to do? It may be the case that it will be more upsetting to see someone who looks just like the person you love, but is actually a totally different person inside.

Should we play God? That is the big question. Maybe in years after I am gone, cloning humans will be an everyday event. But then what would become of the world? The population would simply grow and grow, wouldnt this cause problems!? I think it would!

Although here i seem be following the stance of being against cloning, that is not entirely the case. For instance, I am perfectly willing to accept that perhaps in the future scientists will beable to use theraputic cloning to generate tissue and organs for transplants. This is what cloning should be used for, not to bring people back from the dead but to prolong life in the first place if at all possible.

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My understanding of aesthetics is the way in which something looks, the way something is composed. However, it is about reception, the images are not always pleasurable, poeple have different ideas about what is pleasurably aesthetic and what is not. Digital photography means that we can take an image that may be seen as pleasurable, but then crop it, alter it and so on to the point in which it is not longer pleasurably aesthetic. On the other hand, we can go the opposite way. Digital technology can allow us to generate retro fascist humans, images of models with no spots, excess hair, and the perfect figure. Just think about all the celebrities photos that are airbrushed before appearing in a magazine. What we are seeing, is not a true representation of the person themselves. It makes us reconsider our relationship with the real.

This is a photo of Britney Spears 'detouched'. Who is to say that this is not what Britney actually look like!? Maybe this is what celebrities actually look like and that is why there photos are always airbrushed! haha. Ofcourse, I no that the reality is that Britney doesnt look like this, so why then do so many poeple believe that the perfect airbrushed photos of celebrities are true images of the person!?

"They all look sooooo perfect by the time their pics get to the pages of magazines,but, we, being photoshoppers, know they didnt start out that way. Thev all got lines and wrinkles and blotches and pimples just like the rest of us do" (www.abc.net.au/.../200512/s1525372.htm ).

So as we can see, manipulation of images can take us way from reality, and form a recombinant culture. There are advantages however to digital aesthetics. For instance, we can achieve images that are not possible with contemporary art forms such as painting.

Image below: Pedro Mayer,The Strolling Saint (1993)

However, there is still critism such as the fact that, paintings can actually be more real than photographic portraits, with the photographic not being able to capture the essence/truth of a person.

MY VIEW ON MY DIGITAL CAMERA
These days, digital cameras are the 'in' thing, haven taken over from the disposable film/camera. I however, am one of the rare people who still rely on the disposable camera to catch my memories. Although a digital camera has sat in my room for the past year, it has rarely left the house. This was due to the fact that i found the disposable camera far more simple to use, and it has no battery that ( in the case of my digital camera) can run down quite quickly meaning that it has to be charged up, something of which i dont know how to do! In my opinion, yes, the digital camera may have more qualities such as a better picture, but i think that you lose the element of suprise that you get with the disposable camera/film. While with a digital camera you can see the image straight away, and are able to delete any photos that you dont look 'nice' in, with a disposable camera you get the exitenment of going to pick them up, opening up the packet, not knowing what to expect.

Britney photo: I apologise if the Britney photo does not always how up. Its bascially a digitally altered image of her with many spos and warts etc.

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Her work conveys the way in which technology can offer us a choice. Although controversial, we are beginning to be able to create our own bodies. Many people, for years, have been able to redesign there bodies in an aesthetic way through plastic surgery, but Orlan seeks to push the body to the limit. She is interested, not in the body as it is promoted by the fashion industry, but instead thinks of the body as reconfigured as limit. She challenges the limits of aesthetic beauty.

Orlan has undergone a series of choreographed performances, in which her face is surgically morphed. While celebrating a technically and medically advanced culture, her intention is not to become 'beautiful', but to suggest that the,

"Objective (beauty) is unnattainable and the process horrifying". (http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm)

Orlan, who describes herself as a feminist, morphed different sections of her face to match the facial structures of seven icons of feminine beauty, as they have been portrayed by male artists. Two of the facial structures used were the forehead of DaVinci's 'Mona Lisa' and the chin of Botticelli's 'Venus'. Based on the fact that this would look quite ridiculous, it suggests that the male perception of the ideal feminine beauty is an impossible feat to conquer. The idea of ideal beauty is central to our society, with many people undergoing plastic surgery in order to attain their own perspective of there ideal beauty. Orlans 'performances' make us think about these processes and wonder, as technology evolves futher, will the redesigning of the body become even more extreme? We are beginning to see a world in which we are no longer following the process of evolution that is set out for us. We are taking our body into our own hands, it becoming a canvas for us to work on and change. Although plastic surgery has been around for years, artists such as Orlan are beginning to make us challenge the ides of what art is.

Although in the previous blog I question whether the hybridization of the body and technology was such a bad thing, as it brings us more enablement , I take a slightly different view on Orlans work. The fact that she conveys how ridiculous the idea of ideal beauty is, and the way in which her performances (surgery) show how horrific the process is, makes me wonder why we cannot just let our bodies evolve in the way in which they are meant to. Ofcourse, if I had a big issue with the way i look then it would be likely that I would feel a different way about this, but the fact is, if plastic surgery had never been around, then would our society be so caught up in the idea of the ideal feminine beauty as it is now?

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This blog will explore the idea of transhumanism, the combining of the human body with technology. Technologies have always been adjunct to the body with technologies enebling us to do and perform things with more efficiency and are about enablement. However, technologies have now began to re-engineer the human body, engaging with the body in a way that they are begining to hybridize and merge. As Karl Marx stated,

"We sell our body to the highest bidder and do what it tells us"

An example of this sort of practice is by the australian artist 'Stelarc'. Stelarc surrenders his autonomous body, pushing it to the limits by plugging technlogical prosthetics into his nervous system.

These enable him to perform functions at his command, in a way that increases his functionality. This is a form of an idea called 'transhumanisn'. This is a philosophy that,

"Humanity can, and should, strive to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socially" (http://www.aleph.se/Trans/  )
 
It encourages research into areas such as life extension, physical and mental enhancements and areas such as uploading human consciousness into computers. There are six basic principles that most transhumanists agree on. These are,
1.Transcend-they strive to remove the evolved limits/physical limits.
2.Pragmatism-they use whatever tools prove effective towards there goals.
3.Memetic propogation-they support the proliferation of transhumanist principles and goals.
4.Achievement-they strive to achieve individual ambitions.
5.Diversity-they promote human efforts to grow and adapt to an ever changing universe.
6.Evolution-they believe these priciples should evolve.

Transhumanist Stelarcs work explores and extends the concpet of the body and its relationships with technology through human machine interfaces. He states,

"Bodies are both zombies and cyborgs. We have never had a mine of our own and often perform involuntarily- conditioned and externally prompted" (http://www.stelarc.va.com.au )

In this case, Stelarc externally prompts his body to move through prosthetics plugged into his nervous system, making his body dance to the tune of the machine. Sterlacs engagement with the body is one of which is a hybridization of the human body and technology. Another person who has used this form of hybridization is Kevin Warrick, who embedded devices within him, letting him open doors etc. This type of work looks at the acceleration of the body by technology. It believes that we can improve our human bodies, by for instance, installing improved artificial organs or by adding a third hand (like stelarcs).

Is this what a future human will be like?

Stelarc believes that we need to start re-engineering the body.

"What we really need is a design approach. If you have a heart that wears out after 70 years, this to me is an engineering problem. We should start to re-engineer the body". (http://www.fiv.edu/~mizrachs/Stalarc.html)

His work, although seeming far fetched, has brought into focus the possible fate of the body in a post-human age, a world in which boudaries between humans and machines are blurred. His work has shown us the extent to what technological possibilities may lie ahead in the future, giving us a glimpse of how future generations may live. Many may find the ideas of machines taking over frightening, a threat to the planet. However, the fact is that machines are already a vital and dominant part of our world, ever changing and developing. Maybe we should push aside our paranoia and think that, if these machines are enabling us and helping us to become more efficient, will a future world in which our bodies and machines can hybridize be such a bad thing? For as Stelarc believes,

"We are developing with technology anyway, so we might as well start thinking about how to exert a measure of control over the whole process" (http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/Stelarc.html )

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Media Technology-'Retina of the minds eye'

This blog will critique the idea of a digital future, a world in which machines will become a central part of our lives, This blog will convey, through examples from 'Videodrome' and from Baudrillard, that digital technology can confuse the way in which we see the world and its reality.

In Negropantes book, 'Being Digital', he see's a future where machines will respond directly to our needs and will be sensitive to our emotional states. He see's technology as a 'universal panacea', a remedy for all difficulties, and believes that the digital will bring us together as a species and that we will all become equal in cyberspace. This idea of a direct interaction of human beings with technology can be seen by some to be a controversial subject, as with the growing rates in which technology seems to be expanding, it could be thought that it can be taking over the human bodies mind.

The 1982 film 'Videodrome' by Cronenberg looks at this subject, in which the protagonist, after watching a video called 'videodrome' finds it almost impossible to distinguish whether he is living in a 'real' space or a 'simulated' space, a space in which everything around him is not real but is an imitation, for example, similar to the rides we have in which you feel as though you are travelling in a different space. In this film it is as if whatever the protagonist see's on the screen is real, as if it is 'the retina of the minds eye'. By this i mean,

"The television screen is the retina of the minds eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever happens in the televsion screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore televsion is reality, and reality is less than television" ( http://home.swipnet.se/~w-37337/Iodg3/videodrome.htm  ).

His tone of hallucinations throughout the film come from the tone of the video.

It is as if it is creating a tumor, which is caused by the massive doses of coded signals that are hidden in the transmissions. This is a controversial area of thought, as if this is what the media could be doing to us everyday it is a worrying thought that it can distort our own reality. In the film his tumour becomes a new organ, controlled by the television company. It could be thought that all technology is actually an outgrowth of the brain, feeding us new ideas and taking us to places we havnt been before, providing us with a different reality. Like the video in this film, technology can play us like a video recorder, with the reality in which we think we inhabit actually being no longer there.

In our society today, we often compare ourselves to the ways in which the technology has presented us. John Baudrillard (1987) helps us to understand this explaining that our lives are now nothing more than a parody of what is projected on to the screens around us. He believes that due to the extent of technologies surrounding us, the image is all that remains. We have no recollection of what is 'real' and what is not. Baudrillard thinks apocolypsic, only interested in the obscene. His idea that the image is all that remains, can be followed through to the west, a culture in which alll reality seems to be gone. We dont see it, as we are so tied up in the fiction, no longer knowing where it ends. This can be conveyed by the fact that we often read articles on people such as soap actors, in which they reveal that people often shout out the name of their characters name on the street, many a time giving abuse towards them if their character has been portrayed in a bad way. This emphasises the fine line that lies between the idea of the real and simulated space. People are so caught up in the fiction that they find it hard to remember that the person they are shouting at in the street is not the same person that technology has portrayed them to be.

This blog has shown the powerful effect that media technology can have on society. Viedodrome, although to many may seem very far fetched and to enjoy it you may need to suspend your disbelief, I believe it may be, in a way, an accurate portrayal of how media technology can effect us. Media technology is a powerful medium, and one that is often underlooked.

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What are new media cultures?

Since this blog will be looking at 'New Media Cultures' it probably makes sense if I first look at, what is new media?
The Media itself is a 'mediator', it mediates, stands between us and something else, such as us and information. You could say that it is a form of information exchange, or a form of archive, for example a storage mechanism such as a DVD or CD. The media can be very powerful and can help make social bonds between people. However, as we are recieivng information through this 'mediator' we recieve a quality of information that we cannot be sure of. There is an imposibility of real information as it has to be mediated in some way. As Marshall Mcluen said, 

        "It is the media that changes and defines the message"

Forms of the media saturate our society, we are surrounded by it every day. Karl Marx believed that we are all 'victims of the media'

        "We believe we are free, but everywhere we are in chains"

But I am talking about 'new' media. What do we class as 'new'? When we talk of something 'new' we usually mean something that is current. The word new is ephemeral. It is disposable as there cannot be a new without an old. What we, at this moment in time class as 'new' will be seen as old in months, weeks or even possibly in days time! When it comes to what we think of as 'new media', there can be a debate about what is infact new. Some might think that in term of how long people have been around on the earth, the television is actually a new form of media. However, when we look at the many different forms of media that have arisen since the arrival of the TV, such as the internet and these tiny mobile phones that we are beginning to see then many would say that the television is infact very old.
So i've looked at the term 'media' and the term 'new', leaving us with 'culture'. Raymond Williams describes the term 'culture' as, 

        "A whole way of life"

While Hall say's,

        " By culture here, I mean the actual grounded terrain of practices, representations, languages and customs of any specific society"

You could say that a 'culture' is a shared framework of understanding. It is a collective term reffering to the idea of shared meanings.
With all these new types of media generating, it could be seen that the culture in which we are generating, is almost dissapearing as fast as we are making it. 'New media cultures' represent convenience but a problem arises with the idea of value. In a culture where everything is becoming disposable, 'value' may come into question!

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