Media Mutations

Once upon a time, we used to live in a very linear world. An event would take place, journalists would write about it, ‘traditional’ media would report on it, and the citizens of the world would know what is taking place.

The creation and increasing use of the internet and technology has changed this. In the present day it is not only traditional that producers of media that are able to share stories. In today’s society everything is media and everyone is a media producer. Social Media in particular has enabled people to share not only news worthy stories, but more personal details as well with each other locally and globally.

A result of everyone being able to access and share information instantly has transformed the world from being linear to an ‘everything all at once’ structure.

Manovich poses the question of how to track and visualise the ‘all at once-ness’ of the global digital culture of today. It is a difficult question to find an answer to. Once upon a time, in a linear world it would be very easy to track and visualise the culture because there were a limited number of ways for information to be shared, it could be visualised with very neat and linear graphs and charts.

To be asked this question in an ‘everything all at once’ world encourages us to think in a more abstract way. It is no longer possible to visualise the culture in a way that is linear and in a graph or chart. My personal opinion is that the new culture could be visualised with a lot of colour and would look very chaotic. It could be a tangle of different coloured string or a canvas with lots of layers of paint and colour.

The colours would represent all of our differences and it would look chaotic because with everyone communicating at all times it can be overwhelming to make sense of it all.