A brief summary of Steven Shaviro's reading: Connected, or what it means to live in the network society
The reading by Steven Shaviro
‘Connected’ looks at how society has developed into a network society. Throughout
the section called Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many, Shaviro uses the
example of President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines, who looses power to a
‘smart mob’ this chapter goes on to talk about how people have come together
through mobilized culture to protest; Shaviro talks about the legend of
generation txt and uses examples such as the wildcat protest against, gasoline
prices during 2001 in Britain. (2003, p157-160) This is relatable to the online article “A selfie isn’t
a form of protest, it’s a form of narcissism” (2014) which discusses how young
people have come together to fuel protests such as the #StandbyMe protest,
in which students in Sheffield protested government policy on immigration.
Similar to the way in which Shaviro talks about the texting protests, the
article follows how young people are posting
selfies as a form of peaceful protest however, towards the end of this article
these collective selfie posts are slated for being more so a form of narcissism
then protest. (See selfie research page for more information about this article)
Throughout the reading Shaviro refers
to the change of the networked culture as visually saturated, fragmented,
dizzying and excessive; Shaviro ultimately examines popular culture, political
change, new technologies and community disruption, in relation to mobile
phones, social networks and the social mind within the twenty-first century.
Shaviro looks at how texting anywhere has become normal and inoffensive, he
gives the example of a girl called Faye Slytangco and notes “she was not
surprised when at the wake for a friends father she realized to her
astonishment that they were not praying…people were actually sitting there and
texting…Filipinos don’t see it as rude anymore” (2003,
p159) This idea of being a mobile consumed culture,
that has no sense of manners related to a newspaper article about Barack Obama
taking a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial (2013) the article started by
comparing a shared common interest that Barack Obama had with teenagers, which
was ‘the taking selfies at a funeral
trend’; whereby photos of people taking selfies at sensitive, personal occasions
where being uploaded to a popular Tumblr site, and being laughed at for the insensitive
and narcissist thoughts of the people who had took them.
Throughout the reading Steven Shaviro,
determines that science fiction and social reality have merged together in
todays society and argues that the way in which in our new world is
transforming and being altered by devices, is comparable to a science fiction
book. Shaviro notes “Social Network means that every individual in a smart mob
is a ‘node’…Nodes and links, the elements of social networks made by humans” (2003, p170) Shaviro goes on to discuss
how people have moved from intimate face to face conversations to WiFi
technologies that provide infrastructure for neighborhood-wide and
internet-wide communication. (2003, p171-172)
Towards the end of the reading
Shaviro talks more about a collective intelligence that is generated through
social networks, he notes “Connected and communicating in the right ways, populations
of humans can exhibit a kind of collective intelligence” (2003,
p179). Shaviro ends the reading with the idea
that smart mobs have developed in their own way, resulting from the new world
of technology; similarly to the ways in which the internet has developed from
its original purposes. Shaviro concludes that “Smart mobs are an unpredictable
but at least partially describable emergent property that I see surfacing as
more people use mobile telephones, more chips communicate with each other, more
computers know where they are located, more technology becomes wearable” (2004,
p182) he ends with the idea that these new outlets of media will contrive new forms
of entertainment, sex and conflict.
Bibliography
Newcomb, A. (2013). President Obama Poses for
Selfie at Nelson Mandela's Memorial Service. Available:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-poses-selfie-nelson-mandelas-memorial-service/story?id=21162957.
(Last accessed: 2nd April 2014).
Prendergast, L. (2014). A selfie isn’t a form
of protest, it’s a form of narcissism. Available:
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/lara-prendergast/2014/03/a-selfie-isnt-a-form-of-protest-its-a-form-of-narcissism/.
(Last accessed: 3rd April 2014).
Shaviro, S (2003). Connected, or what it means
to live in the network society. Minneapolis: The Regents of The University
of Minnesota. P157-p183.
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