University of London
Department of Cultural Studies

MS201 Media, Culture and Identity Examination Paper
Date: 15th May 2018
Time: 2.00-4.00pm

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES
Answer TWO questions. Each question carries equal marks, Do not use substantially the same material in more than one answer. Search technologies are allowed, but indicate the resource locator, or search query and product used, for each reference. Please read questions carefully.

1) “Identity is the product of your networks.” Discuss this assertion, referencing historical debates around trust and reputation in technological communication.
2) To what extent did the rise of mobile communication networks in third-world countries between 2005-2010 affect the media industries in: The Former United States of America; Sub-Saharan Africa; Iraq; Australasia; The Celtic Union?
3) What was ‘Scheduling’? Discuss giving examples from the major linear media of the late 20th Century.
4) Some analysts argue that individual privacy should not be linked to economic activity. What possible other solutions exist for state validation of citizens’ cultural consumption? What are the pros and cons of these solutions?
5) How has the dissolution of Google led to the ‘balkanisation’ of information? How would the information industry have developed had the company remained a globally owned public utility?
6) Describe 3 of the following content formats for popular media, and their impact on society: Reality Feeds; Anytime Radio; VoteSport; Extreme Celebrity, NeighbourhoodWatch.
7) In 2016, the average UK citizen had over 30 petabytes of media storage. This would have equated to over 500 years of continuous media consumption at typical consumption rates in the year 2000. How have simultaneous viewing technologies changed the way in which media is produced and consumed in the UK?
8) Describe the impact of the’ Media Revolutions’ of the last 10 years, in particular the demise of News International in 2008, the formation of the World Cultural Trade Organisation in 2010, the ‘G21’ group of independent media nations, and the rise in decentralised media terrorist networks.
9) How has PersonalJournalism affected notions of ‘integrity’ and ‘truth’ in news production? In your opinion, have these changes been beneficial or detrimental?

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The University of York

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICS
FIRST YEAR EXAMINATIONS 2018

POLITICS B – THE WORLD OF POLITICS

Answer THREE questions, at least one from each section.

SECTION 1: THE DISCIPLINE OF POLITICS

1. Describe and assess the impact of two of the following political theories: Marxism, Capitalism, Fundamentalism, De-centrism, Radical Consumerism.
2. Discuss the following historical political concepts, and the key drivers behind their demise: State, Parliament, Manifesto, Election.
3. What contribution does decentralised network theory make to our understanding of politics?
4. Why has religion been such a central preoccupation and focus of debate in political science over the last 20 years?
5. Identify the main contributions, if any, of either environmentalism or ultra-local militancy to the study and practise of politics.

SECTION 2: WORLD POLITICS

1. What are some of the important factors that have contributed to the current division between the ‘conscious’ and ‘agnostic’ global political networks?
2. What role have assassinations played in political history? Discuss citing either Sweden, 2003; Tokyo 2005; Rio de Janeiro 2008 or London, Marseille, Frankfurt, Porto & Dublin, 2012.
3. Has the rise of CityStates in China contributed positively or negatively to the development process?
4. How did EasyPolitics lead to the rise of Radical Consumerism in Western Europe? Discuss giving examples of European Chief Executive Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s use of mass-media and ‘just-in-time’ politics.
5. “There is no such thing as money, only differences in your personal value network” – discuss in relation to the phasing out of the Euro and Dollar in 2015.

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Like Matt Jones, I’ve been asked to produce a few illustrations of potential futures for my work. Unlike Matt, I find it incredibly hard to try and synthesise the huge number of potential scenarios into something that isn’t cliched or too predictable. So whereas Matt managed to fire out 8 over a weekend, it’s taken me nearly two weeks to come up with 2. I always have the problem of how to write scenarios – Phil has pointed out how easy it is to fall into the trap of technological determinism, or to make the whole story just exposition. I’ve ended up using a cheap trick – I’ve adopted exam papers as a structure for two of the scenarios, one based on Politics, one on Media Studies. I’ve found that the exam paper structure has helped keep the writing short and to the point, although its sometimes been hard to encapsulate a lot of potential change in a few sentences. Hopefully, they give you enough information to indicate what has changed and act as a starting point for further speculation, but I’m also worried they might just be too damn confusing. Any comments welcome…

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Matt Webb has been working on a social software application to replicate ‘glancing‘ – the kind of low-level social interaction we use to confirm the social status of a group, or as a precursor to more attentive communication. Having been exposed to critical theory when I was far too vunerable (ie, as an art student in the early ’90’s), I couldn’t help comparing Matt’s ‘glancing’ with the Lacanian ‘gaze‘.

Glancing is proposed as a way of technologically representing signifiers of assurance – the nod, wink or sly look that passes between members of a social group to let someone else know you’re with them. As Matt uses IM infrastructures as the base of the ‘glancing’ protocol, it is asynchronous, so the ‘glances’ have a prolonged life, starting intense and gradually falling after an hour or so. This way, people who are not at their desktops can see the recent history of glances and respond, perhaps encouraging other group members to glance until there is a quorum of attention for an IM chat.

Lacan’s concept of the ‘Gaze’ is similarly concerned with reassurance and identity. Its root is in the ‘mirror stage’ of child development, when the infant first recognises the image in the mirror as itself, and so enters a symbolic order in which the ‘real’ is lost in a ‘screen’ of signifiers and representations. The confusion between this screen of our idealised projections, and the intangible ‘real’ is the heart of Lacanian Psychoanalytic theory, and was productively used in the feminist film theories of Laura Mulvey, amongst others.

But the Gaze has an uncanny element – look too closely and you realise that the screen of your projected desires looks back – it has a presence (the trace of the ‘real’) that destabilises your position as the centre of your projected universe. Lacan illustrates this with a pretty bizarre anecdote involving a sardine can bobbing about in a harbour – better to use his other example, Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, an almost uncanny illustration of the concept. In this painting, the two ambassadors are pictured with objects that represent their wealth and status, a literal ‘screen’ of their desires. At the bottom, the anamorphically distorted image of a skull represents morality, a sideways glance at the ‘real’ behind the ‘screen’ of their life achivements.

Will Matt’s Glancing elide into this uncanny territory? Will the soft throb of the glance icon invoke the warm glow of friendship, or will it feel more like the goosebump sensation of someone staring at the back of your head? Matt suggests that the glance is a form of empty communication, like the blank SMSes sent between Japanese schoolchildren. Lacan tells us that there is no empty communication, that even the shiny surface of a sardine can ‘looks back’ at us by participating in the forest of signs that make up our symbolic order. For Mulvey, the gaps between film frames reveal the fetishised world of cinema as nothing but a ‘screen’, and reminds us of the unbridgeable gap between our desires and the ‘real’.

Even empty communication carries a message, like a seat still warm from the last person who sat there. By introducing a half-life to the split-second glance, Matt is opening up an uncanny world of absence as well as a new protocol for presence.

Matt Webb has been working on a social software application to replicate ‘glancing‘ – the kind of low-level social interaction we use to confirm the social status of a group, or as a precursor to more attentive communication. Having been exposed to critical theory when I was far too vunerable (ie, as an art student in the early ’90’s), I couldn’t help comparing Matt’s ‘glancing’ with the Lacanian ‘gaze‘.

Glancing is proposed as a way of technologically representing signifiers of assurance – the nod, wink or sly look that passes between members of a social group to let someone else know you’re with them. As Matt uses IM infrastructures as the base of the ‘glancing’ protocol, it is asynchronous, so the ‘glances’ have a prolonged life, starting intense and gradually falling after an hour or so. This way, people who are not at their desktops can see the recent history of glances and respond, perhaps encouraging other group members to glance until there is a quorum of attention for an IM chat.

Lacan’s concept of the ‘Gaze’ is similarly concerned with reassurance and identity. Its root is in the ‘mirror stage’ of child development, when the infant first recognises the image in the mirror as itself, and so enters a symbolic order in which the ‘real’ is lost in a ‘screen’ of signifiers and representations. The confusion between this screen of our idealised projections, and the intangible ‘real’ is the heart of Lacanian Psychoanalytic theory, and was productively used in the feminist film theories of Laura Mulvey, amongst others.

But the Gaze has an uncanny element – look too closely and you realise that the screen of your projected desires looks back – it has a presence (the trace of the ‘real’) that destabilises your position as the centre of your projected universe. Lacan illustrates this with a pretty bizarre anecdote involving a sardine can bobbing about in a harbour – better to use his other example, Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, an almost uncanny illustration of the concept. In this painting, the two ambassadors are pictured with objects that represent their wealth and status, a literal ‘screen’ of their desires. At the bottom, the anamorphically distorted image of a skull represents morality, a sideways glance at the ‘real’ behind the ‘screen’ of their life achivements.

Will Matt’s Glancing elide into this uncanny territory? Will the soft throb of the glance icon invoke the warm glow of friendship, or will it feel more like the goosebump sensation of someone staring at the back of your head? Matt suggests that the glance is a form of empty communication, like the blank SMSes sent between Japanese schoolchildren. Lacan tells us that there is no empty communication, that even the shiny surface of a sardine can ‘looks back’ at us by participating in the forest of signs that make up our symbolic order. For Mulvey, the gaps between film frames reveal the fetishised world of cinema as nothing but a ‘screen’, and reminds us of the unbridgeable gap between our desires and the ‘real’.

Even empty communication carries a message, like a seat still warm from the last person who sat there. By introducing a half-life to the split-second glance, Matt is opening up an uncanny world of absence as well as a new protocol for presence.

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Lumen are one of the most interesting new media organisations in the UK, and their annual conference and performance programme, EVOLUTION, stands head and shoulders above most of the flash-fests that call themselves ‘cutting-edge’. EVOLUTION is different for two reasons – it specialises in representing seminal historical work from artists that have been hugely influential, but neglected by the mainstream; and it is programmed by two people – Dennis Hopkins and Will Rose – who have an incredible knowledge and passion about this area, so manage to curate programmes with depth, texture and real insight.

This year’s programme has many higlights, including presentations and exhibitions by Kevin McCoy, a walk around Leeds by the Survellance Camera Players, and the ‘commodore 64 video graffiti’ of Cory Arcangel and BEIGE. Historically, there’s a presentation by Dan Graham, videos by Nam June Paik, and Woody & Steina Vasulka talking about 30 years at The Kitchen, the seminal NY media organisation and venue. Best of all is ‘Liquid Modernity’, a conversation between radical sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and entropy artist Gustav Metzger. Bauman’s writing on globalisation, post-modernity and sociology proposes real solutions rather than pat observations, and Metzger’s artistic career has continually challenged the commodity fetishes of the art world. In conversation, they will be a heady mix. Book those train tickets for Leeds now…

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Currently jet-lagged, and catching up after a lovely trip to San Francisco, spent eating in fine restaurants, digging for old vinyl and getting more used to taking pictures with my medium format camera. Whilst I was away, I didn’t go online once, and hardly read a newspaper, so I’ve got that weird dislocated experience of picking through nearly two weeks of news in small, non-linear fragments.

Two major stories broke that directly affect what I do – the (long-awaited) announcement of who would lead the Government review of the BBC’s Internet Services, and Greg Dyke trailing the Creative Archive in his Edinburgh speech. The two are symbiotically related, in that the Creative Archive is one illustration of what the BBC’s role on the internet should be in the future. I’d like to think I had a part to play in the Creative Archive – I organised an event with Larry Lessig in February, then took some BBC people over to see Larry and Brewster Kahle in SF whilst I was at ETCON, and have contributed to the project since. But the truth is, the idea of doing something with the archive online had been kicking around the organisation for ages – the team I run at the BBC have been developing concept ideas in this area for the last 3 years, and there have been many, many others trying to find ways to do something with the vast cultural heritage of the organisation. Danny has written an excellent article for the Guardian Online about the annoucement, and followed it up with a couple of good blog posts. The comments on Danny’s posts are really interesting, in particular about the scale of the project, and what it could feasibly achieve in its first iterations.

I’m really pleased the project was mentioned in Greg’s speech, although the debate doesn’t seem to have kicked off in the press over here. Regardless of that, it makes the BBC a *very* exciting place to work at the moment, and actually makes me want to get back to work. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever come back from a holiday and felt like that…

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Christiane Paul, one of the most experienced new media curators in the US, has written a book for Thames & Hudson’s canonical ‘World of Art’ series on Digital Art. There have been a number of books recently trying to pick themes out of the heady world of new media culture over the last 10 years, including Lev Manovich’s ‘Language of New Media’ (Lev! stop using frames!) and Noah Wardriup-Fruin’s ‘New Media Reader’.

Christiane’s book focuses on art, rather than the broader impacts of new media, and is a pretty good survey, starting with some context from Nam June Paik and Marcel Duchmap (of course…). Its a broad sweep of work, covering net.art, networked installation, online performances and ‘tactical media’. There’s also mention of mobile projects, including ‘Speakers Corner’, a project I was involved in.

I’m glad Christiane included that project, as its one of the things I’m most proud of, despite the protracted development and extended rebuild. It also means Jaap de Jonge gets a credit in the index – he deserves to reserve a place in the historicising of new media art, as he has created some of the most compelling, and accessible public art pieces of the last 10 years. And it also means that a corner of the canon of digital media will be forever Huddersfield…

😉

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