Critically analyse contemporary visual culture of the Philippines as recorded and shared in citizen media October 22, 2008
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“Critically analyse contemporary visual culture of the Philippines as recorded and shared in citizen media”
Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of “Web 1.0″ to provide “Network as Platforms” computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0 (O’Reilley, 2005). Participatory culture is relatively defined as low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement with a strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others (Jenkins 2006). This project is a reflection on today’s ocular-centric practices of Filipinos through the Sinulog festival as archived and shared by people through the internet, to internalize and understand the products of nation’s colonial past. There are theoretical challenges on how to relate this work with previous discussions in class. The theories covered on this project concern about the ideas of participatory culture as presented by Henry Jenkins (2006) and the ‘we media’ from Browman and Willis (ed. Lasica, 2003). Tuesday’s (2004) ideas about mashup is also incorporated on this video presentation and Dr. Bruns’s (2007) theory of produsage as it undermines the romantic notions of an artist as an individual genius. Technical difficulties are also obstacles that I must hurdle in conceptualizing the video presentation with the use of modern technologies through computer softwares that enable me to use new tools and technologies from a range of subcultures promoting ‘do-it-yourself‘ media production (Jenkins 2006).
The video project is presenting visual images of the Sinulog festival, a celebration of culture centred on the feast and arrival of the Holy Child Jesus in the country almost five hundred years ago. Visual culture as defined by Nicholas Mirzoeff is perhaps best understood as a tactic for studying the functions of a world addressed through pictures, images, and visualizations, rather than through texts and words (Irvine 2008). I was able to create a slide of moving images that narrates the story of the celebration as captured by people who shared their snapshots about the festivities online. The pictures were gathered from weblogs and creative common sights such as flickr, my personal clip on YouTube and soundsnap.com for the music, these online sites provided the resources to make the whole presentation.
The beauty of doing the theme about visual culture of the Philippines specified on the Sinulog festival, is the varied online resources that I can access, from weblogs of local people and tourists who experienced being on the celebration, official and unofficial web pages, texts about its history and timeline on Wikipedia, numerous YouTube clips and on image and music search engines. There are a total of 213000 hits when the word “Sinulog” is searched on Google. 1910 videos on YouTube and 1364 for Flickr licensed under creative commons.
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others (Glaser 2006). It is a manifestation that the Internet, as a medium for news, is maturing. With every major news event, online media evolve. And while news sites have become more responsive and better able to handle the growing demands of readers and viewers, online communities and personal news and information sites are participating in an increasingly diverse and important role that, until recently, has operated without significant notice from mainstream media. These acts of citizen engaging in journalism are not just limited to weblogs. They can be found in newsgroups, forums, chat rooms, collaborative publishing systems and peer-to-peer applications like instant messaging. As new forms of participation have emerged through new technologies, many have struggled to name them (ed. Lasica 2003).
The new form of participation that people are engaging through citizen journalism can be seen most of the time online. But regular media outlets such as local Philippine channels are putting the concept of citizen reporting in their news programmes. Citizens provide raw materials like mobile phone clips about certain events that concern the whole community like crimes, accidents, disasters and natural calamities. Professional journalists cannot always cover firsthand the moment an incident happened. Utilizing the power of modern technology through cellular phone features such as the Multi-Media System (MMS) and the 3G, enables concern citizens to report and share events and experiences firsthand either online or to these media outlets. Because of the wide dispersion of so many excellent tools for capturing live events — from tiny digital cameras to videophones — the average citizen can now make news and distribute it globally, an act that was once the province of established journalists and media companies (Glaser 2006).
Getting visual image-materials on the internet for the video is a reflection on the act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires. (ed. Lasica, 2003).
The challenges of making this project were both technical and theoretical. It is theoretically challenging in the sense that I have to relate my work through writing an exegesis about the different theories that were encountered from the previous topics in class. The theories were actually very useful in understanding the complexities of today’s media culture as it explains in simple terms the nature or how it evolves into a more complex platform for participation and cultivation of awareness for ordinary citizens.
Technically, I first faced difficulties on how to gather online materials to be used that are not copyrighted and under creative commons. Thankfully, Flickr provided pictures for the theme and soundsnap.com for the music, are under creative commons. Copyright issues kept me at bay and limited the use of YouTube clips that could have add colour and variety of media on the presentation. But to execute my vision on how this project would go, I manage to use personal clips that I posted on YouTube to give its future audience a glimpse on some of the actions about the celebration. These clips used were not professionally taken, just ordinary shots with bad audio and vision from a 2005 Olympus 5 megapixel digital camera. This unfortunate scenario is playing on the essence of participatory journalism as a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon in which there is little or no editorial oversight or formal journalistic workflow dictating the decisions of a staff. Instead, it is the result of many simultaneous, distributed conversations that either blossom or quickly atrophy in the Web’s social network (ed. Lasica, 2003).
Having a very little technical background about window’s movie maker, creating a movie was another challenge that I have to overcome. A trial-by-error application of the different features of the movie maker enabled me to discover and create a video presentation using the different effects sufficiently, understands the purpose of the timeline plus adding music and texts on it. The whole idea of combining the gathered online materials such as the pictures used, downloaded music and YouTube clips were applications of a mashup.
Mashup as defined is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. These existing sources can be web services (through the use of API’s), RSS feeds or even just other Websites (by screen-scraping)… Many people are experimenting with mashups using Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and YouTube APIs, which has led to the creation of mashup editors. Flickrvision and youMashTube are examples of these. (Wikipedia 2008) The remix today is part of how our culture operates and relates to itself. The blending of styles, the appropriation of signs and symbols, sounds and images — this is postmodernism at work. And yet it is more, because in its own way it is a form of progress in that it reveals the democratic and emancipatory potential of new technologies, and the capacity for cultural participation to actualize that potential (Tuesday 2004).
This project is also an example of the Produsage theory as presented by Dr. Alex Bruns(2007) of Queensland University of Technology. Dr. Bruns sighted the idea about creative practice as:
Sites such as Flickr for images, YouTube, Jumpcut, and
Revver for video, and ccMixter for audio, as well as a
plethora of blogs and collaborative publishing
environments for text, now provide a rich and diverse
range of user-submitted creative content. Further, legal
frameworks such as the Creative Commons suite of
licenses allow for the re-use and remixing of existing
content into new artworks which are then able to be further
reworked by subsequent generations of users. This opens
up new avenues for creative work and publication beyond
the traditional media industries, as well as undermining
romantic notions of the artist as individual genius.
The idea of Dr. Bruns demonstrates creative practice on re-using and remixing existing content into a new artwork, my video presentation is a manifestation on how modern media and technologies evolve as it empowers users of the new media to be more creative and become independent artist of their own beyond the corners of traditional media industries.
Web 2.0 websites gave us the opportunity to explore our creativity and pursue our interests through the platform that enable us to create and participate (O’Reilley, 2005). The weblogs, Google, Wikipedia, eBay, YouTube, Flickr are just examples on where we can use our creativity in sharing our ideas, knowledge, interests, videos and pictures to the rest of the world. The internet is the fastest way to reach a vast number of people, a new trend that can empower the user to have an active role in community building through the formation of groups, people want to feed their obsessions and share them with like-minded individuals. This is what fuels, in large part, many social connections on the Internet (ed. Lasica, 2003 ).
The theories tackled during the span of the course enabled me a greater understanding on how these theoretical systems work and relate to the practices of modern media and participatory culture as it empower people regardless of being a non-professional in the field of journalism or the like. Dr. Bruns’s (2007) produsage idea justified the notion of being an individual artist. It gave ordinary people like me to pursue personal interest on being a journalist without the conventional expertise.
After making the video it gave me more confidence to explore and use the technologies provided by softwares available in the computer such as Window’s Movie Maker, Audacity for the podcast, Adobe Photoshop for the image manipulation in Comm 2202 and Apple’s Final Cut Express for film editing, these can be added on my skills for future references on work-related tasks. The whole final project also gave me an opportunity to show my local culture through the visual images as inspired by the nature of a participatory culture and citizen journalism as shared by those who participate online who usually create content to inform and entertain others (ed. Lasica, 2003). The total result of this course is an enriching experience for me to learn the different theories, technicalities and practicalities about modern media, it gives a broader sense of participation from ordinary people, a platform to be creative and imaginative in showing community awareness through the influential power or today’s media. Thus, this unit is a powerful source of knowledge on how I will be applying things learned in my daily online existence.
Sinulog Festival a glimpse through citizen journalism (1:57)
References:
Bowman, Shane and Willis, Chris (2003 ) ‘We Media’ in Lasica, J.D. (ed.) http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php?id=P36 (accessed 21 September 2003 )
Bruns, Alex (2007) Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation.
http://produsage.org/files/Produsage%20(Creativity%20and%20Cognition%202007).pdf (accessed 13 June 2007).
Glaser, Mark (2006) Your Guide to Citizen Journalism. http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/09/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_ci.html (accessed 27 September 2006).
Howard- Spink, Sam (2004) Grey Tuesday: Online cultural activism and the mash-up of music and politics. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/howard/ (30 September 2004).
Irvine, Martin (2008) Introducing Visual Culture: Ways of Looking at all things visual. http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/Intro-VisualCulture.html (accessed 2008).
Jenkins, Henry (2007) From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part Two) http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/from_participatatory_culture_t_1.html (accessed 06 March 2007).
Mashup (2008) Mashup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) (accessed September 2008).
Photos, Music and Video Clips References:
Akosikenet (2008) Sinulog Dancers. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 20 January 2008).
Akosikeniet (2008) Sinulog Textures. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 21 January 2008).
Blueacid (2008) Sinulog Festival 08 (Viva Pit Senyor). http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 20 January 2008).
Cheonsa (2008) Sinulog 2008. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 20 January 2008).
Fernandez, Roro (2008) Sinulog 2008. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 20 January 2008).
Fernandez, Roro (2008) Sinulog 2008. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 16 February 2008).
Kalandrakas (2008) Sinulog 2008. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 19 January 2008).
Markiiboi (2008) Sinulog 2008.http://searc.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 20 January 2008).
Ted_Abbott (2008) Sinulog 2008. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 27 January 2008).
+Whiteknight+ (2008) Sinulog Festival 2008. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 20 January 2008).
Leaver, Tama (2006) Sources of Legally Reusable Media. http://tamaleaver.pbwiki.com/Sources+of+Legally+Reusable+Media (accessed 2006)
Leylander (2008) My Cebu Photo Blog. http://search.creativecommons.org/# (accessed 10 September 2008).
Ramfersean (2008) Sinulog08 Tribu Basakanon. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=bbpRVWEKnTc (accessed 21 January 2008).
Ramfersean (2008) Sinulog 2008 Tribu Lumad Basakanon. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb3a4Njb69E (accessed 24 January 2008).
Ramfersean (2008) Sinulog 2008 Tribu Alikaraw. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=L5wNIeUrOWg (accessed 25 January 2008).
BLASTWAVEFX (2008) Musical Tribal. http://www.soundsnap.com/taxonomy/term/299?page=7 (accessed 2008).
BLASTWAVEFX (2008) Musical Tribal Mysterious Light Loop. http://www.soundsnap.com/search/audio/musical+tribal+mysterious+light+loop/score (accessed 2008).
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