BCM112: Not Everything Is As It Seems

Framing can be used in many different ways but the two most prominent that I have noticed is when people use it to filter their content to content that matters, and when they use it to shape a persona for themselves online.

WHAT IS FRAMING?

Framing is to take aspects of reality and to refine them to a point where an audience perceives that to be real instead. It is then making these refined parts more salient in order to draw attention to this “new reality”.

CONTENT

Content is often filtered down to only the best and most relevant information and ideas. This is so the content surrounding the core idea isn’t jeopardized by anything that doesn’t fit. The content is also used to help create the persons online persona. Framing in this particular circumstance can be used to portray events in a certain way.

PERSONA

It is often assumed that what people show on the internet, especially by celebrities, is a real representation of their life when it is usually a glossed up version of it. Not everything is how it seems and this persona is usually cultivated and carefully created by stringing together select pieces of content.

Below is an example of how I take a few of my cosplay selfies which is an example of framing:

The Picture I Took

The GIF of How and Where it was Taken

 

BCM112: Closed Cathedral, Open Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a book by American software developer and open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond that describes his theories of the “Cathedral model” of closed source media and technology verses the “Bazaar model” of open source media and technology.

An example of closed source media would be something like apple products and the App Store. There are some apps that are released on Google Play that just don’t make it to the app store.

This of course has its ups and downs. By Apple being so controlling over the content that is put on the App store they are able to very easily filter out anything that could be harmful to a persons device such as a program with a hidden virus. That being said Apple is also able to censor their content; you make an app that Apple doesn’t like? Well it’s not gonna show up on the app store any time soon.

This website shows these pros and cons in a lot more detail. Take a look if your interested.

Below is a meme describing the desire for more open source content:

BCM112: A Story of Many Platforms

Transmedia stories are the stories that unfold over a multitude of different platforms. I would like to draw your attention to the much loved series of games, Final Fantasy, one in particular, Final Fantasy XV.

This was the first Final Fantasy Game that I had played and it quickly became one of my favourite games, not because of the gameplay itself but because of the depth of the story behind the events of the game and the characters themselves which was built up using transmedia tactics.

Final Fantasy XV wasn’t released only as a game, its story was started with an anime known as Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV which introduced the characters to the audience before the game was released. A stunning cgi movie (Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV) was then released which filled in the blanks on the world and what had happened while the main characters were off unaware.

After these two things were released the game then came along; the story made so much more sense because most things were already known by the audience if they watched the other stuff before hand.

Here is a Boardroom Suggestion Meme I have created to showcase the splendor that is “transmedia”:

BCM112: Copyright Hindering Creativity?

When writing I am often held up on one question: Is this original enough? When drawing I am often held up on a similar question: Is this my original thought, or did I subconsciously pick up on it from somewhere else?

Does copyright hinder creativity? I personally would say no. Creativity is to make your own ideas and create things that haven’t been thought of before. In this sense, creativity is not obstructed by copyright laws because these new ideas are not protected by anyone but yourself.

Once these ideas become reality they then belong to the person or company that conceived the idea of them.

Copyright however can be a bit weird sometimes because of the invention of the ‘Public Domain”, a fanciful place where free shit can be found all the time for free usage… for free. That’s right, FOR FREE, you can use anything in the public domain in almost anyway you want. Did I mention it was FREE!

Take Disney for example: most of the animated classics we know and love today began as gruesome Grimm’s fairy tales that would have scared the living daylights out of any little kid that had them read as a bedtime story.

I have made this meme below to further explain my point:

  The irony of this meme is that it is both original and unoriginal at the same time…

BCM112: Legacy Media vs The Internet

When producing media content within legacy media (old style stuff like the news printed in newspapers or presented on tv) it goes through a gatekeeper who has the final say on what stays and what goes. They can stop content from being produced if they deem it inappropriate or unworthy of being published. This makes for a fragile network where everything is ordered, meaning everything can easily fall apart.

The internet however provides a space for free reign and total anarchy in the way that people create, analyse and respond to things. Take 4chan for example, a deep dark hole that I venture to very rarely. You can literally do anything there and not get into trouble… well not most times.

This meme is something that I created to represent the gatekeeper of legacy media. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the trilogy called “Lord of the Rings”.

BCM112: Memetic Warfare

What the hell is memetic warfare you may ask? Well look no further for the answer because it’s literally staring you back in the face.  Memetic warfare is exactly as stated, some kind of conflict using memes.

An example of this is the # DraftOurDaughters campaign which was started as an attack against Hilary Clinton by the “Anonymous” persons of 4chan (*wonderful place that is). This attack was spread over many different platforms like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook as a means of spreading the attack even further. On top of this, it was carried out so well that some people actually believed it.

It can be argued that memes are the way to go if your looking to publish a message to a widespread audience, and that memetic warfare is incredibly powerful (like the infinity gauntlet powerful, that shit should be used wisely).

I have made this video below to further illustrate my point:

BCM112: A Web of Opinions

With the emergence of social media, the media has moved from being centralized around one source to becoming a network of opinions where people can interact with each other. It has moved from a system of “One to many” to a system of “Many to many”.

Take a simple smartphone for example. It’s an entire newsroom completely at a person’s fingertips. You’ve got social media apps, a camera and the internet, all of which allow you to contribute and produce content which was previously only easily accessible to people who had the authority over the people that Jay Rosen says are “formally known as the audience.”

I created the Soundcloud below to represent how many different ways our society today can use social media in order to respond to something that was perhaps a “one to many” or “centralized” news story to begin with and how it can transform into that web of many opinions.

 

BCM112: Craft In a Digital Sense

The world has gone through a paradigm shift where we have gone from passive consumers to people who actively make content to use and participate in. The internet has adopted this in the sense of taking craft into a digital media.

The change of craft through the use of the internet has developed things such as digital production where production designs can be changed on the fly where they previously couldn’t have. It has produced glitch and a e s t h e t i c, which have been accepted as the internet’s form of a collage, a combination of a ton of different images, textures, sounds and topics.

We live in a post-industrial era where the digital aspect of the internet allows for people to dissolve the boundaries between production and conception. People are able to design and develop things on the fly and begin producing it straight away.

 

BCM 112: The Medium Is The Message

What is the meaning of ‘the medium is the message’? I don’t believe it was meant to be as straight forward as it sounds. The phrase ‘the medium is the message’ has a paradoxical nature about it; how can something be both the medium and the message? It’s almost like saying that all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.

Well… The medium is the means by which the message is presented. This medium spoken about by Marshall McLuhan (the smart dude who coined the term) is representative of the progress humanity has made in the way which they produce their message in order for it to reach other people: from papyrus to radio to television to internet memes. The message, while it can be an exchange of information, is more the effect that the medium has on the audience to which the form of media is shown.