「Positions through Contextualising」week 3

Starting from the brief of ‘Positions through iterating,’ I have been addressing the same question: ‘How do social networks impact our way of thinking?’

In previous studio work, I attempted to use the process of a solar eclipse to demonstrate the impact of social networks on our ways of thinking.

Initially, I tried editing together videos of solar eclipses from social media using multi-take cut techniques. This approach stemmed from an early realization of the similarities between multi-take cuts and our method of watching videos on social media platforms.

That was my first answer.

Subsequently, I began to consider the characteristics of social networks more rigorously, hoping to use publications as a way to illustrate the changes in thinking brought about by social networks.

‘A History of Reading’ marked the beginning of my exploration into the characteristics of social networks. I first interpreted social networks as a process of information exchange. Drawing on the general description of the dissemination of information in ‘A History of Reading,’ I summarized the features of social networks as ‘fragmented output,’ ‘patchwork input,’ and ‘misunderstood understanding.’ In the second publication, I attempted to combine the process of a solar eclipse with multi-take cuts to showcase these three aspects.

I edited together clips of solar eclipses recorded from different perspectives by different users, simulating fragmented input and patchwork output. I also misleadingly used elements in the videos unrelated to the eclipse to create a false eclipse process, simulating misunderstood understanding.

That was my second answer.

Later, in ‘The Shallows,’ I read Nicholas Carr’s descriptions of how ‘intelligent technology’ influences our thought processes. Carr used the examples of mechanical clocks and maps, capturing how certain features of these tools have impacted human thinking—clocks: uniformity, regularity, cyclic repetition; maps: boundedness, the planar arrangement of objects. This led me to realize that prototypes that change human thinking should meet the following criteria:

However, the characteristics I had previously outlined—’fragmented output,’ ‘patchwork input,’ ‘misunderstood’—did not meet these requirements.

Thus, I constructed the prototype of social networks as ‘digitized reality,’ which meets these three criteria. Digitized reality is also a crucial foundation for the operation of social networks. For example, when we share a meal on social networks, it is not the meal itself we share but an electronic representation of it through photos or text.

That was my third answer.

My first task was to visually present this prototype through publications, still with the solar eclipse. However, in this context, the solar eclipse was no longer the narrative’s focus but a metaphor I used to describe digitized reality.

The structure of this publication moves from big to small (simultaneously from reality to digitized reality). I offered three interpretations of the eclipse:

Solar eclipse by the moon: A solar eclipse occurs because part of the sunlight is blocked by the moon. If you are in the shadow of the moon, then you can see the eclipse.

Solar eclipse by mobile phone: A solar eclipse occurs because part of the sunlight is blocked by a mobile phone. If you are in the shadow of the mobile phone, then you can see the eclipse.

Reality eclipse by digitization: A reality eclipse occurs because part of reality is blocked by digitization. If you are in the shadow of digitization, then you can see the eclipse.

An eclipse is a specific visual phenomenon from a specific angle; we see the moment the sun is obscured by the moon but not the spatial relationship behind them. Digitization is observing the world from a digital perspective, seeing the flattened information rather than the complex relationships behind it.

The second step was to use visual methods (again, through publication) to demonstrate ‘how do social networks impact our way of thinking.’

Here, I need to mention the final reference: ‘Second International Handbook of Internet Research’ from Springer, particularly an article on how computer networks became social. In this article, I learned about three theoretical systems related to social networks: SNA, NS, ANT.

In Castells’ Network Society theory, Castells introduces the concepts of ‘individualized space of flow’ and ‘personal timeless time.’ We might initially understand these as the ability on social networks to disregard the limitations of time and space. Spatially, we can communicate with someone on the other side of the planet; temporally, a comment we make on the internet can be permanently preserved, and live coverage of events like the Olympic Games tends to create a sense that the world is sharing the same time: a global present.

ANT’s methods are critical and interpretive. One of the key ANT concepts is translation, which involves creating convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously different. For example, social network sites such as Friendster first introduced ‘friends’ as a feature on their social networking site in 2002. The designers adopted the highly socially valued convention of friendship and transformed it into a database operation. The practices and meanings of friendship were translated into the technical event of creating ‘Friends.’

From these two theoretical systems, I derived the impact of digitized reality on our understanding of time and space and our understanding of interpersonal relationships.

In this publication, I took screenshots of all my friends’ profiles from my social media apps and placed them alongside their social media IDs. This publication defines all my ‘friends’ as defined by social media. Whether someone is or isn’t my friend is very clear, and I have an exact number of how many friends I have. Digitized relationships remove all vague boundaries, providing a precise definition for all relationships.

In this publication, I continuously entered the time of different regions under a real-time clock. Because the speed at which I enter information and the speed at which digital information is transmitted differ significantly, the time I enter is never the current time. I overlaid the manually entered times on a world map displaying time zones to demonstrate the illusion created by the high-speed transmission of digitized information that the whole world is experiencing the same moment simultaneously. The digital version of time and space makes us feel as though the entire world is at the same place at the same time.

This is a summary of my studio work over these weeks, providing three answers to the question, ‘How does social networks impact our way of thinking?