Lend Me Your Ears…

My first image began with the idea of creating a statement about modern society’s relationship with technology as a sociopolitical force, exploring ideas pertaining to digital communication and its effects on self-expression. As discussed in Week Six, the advent of digital technology and social media in the past two decades has led to the emergence of ‘one-to-many’ or ‘many-to-many’ communications as the dominant form of media in contemporary society (Jenkins, Ito, & Boyd 2015, pp. 1–4). This contrasts heavily with the information flows of ‘many-to-one’ that accompanied the birth of mass communications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The society which we now find ourselves in is the reversal of this paradigm: ‘control’ of media discourse (if any such control could be said to exist) now lies in the hands of the entire digital population—in some ways this could be interpreted as the ultimate form of direct democracy, where each digitally present person is allowed a medium to communicate their own opinions, complex thoughts, and ideas, with the possibility of collaboration and discussion also present.

However, this capacity for discussion also raises concerning points about the quality of sociopolitical discourse—contemporary political spheres now place great emphasis on social media, even though such media has become a hotbed for opinionated and anti-intellectual exchanges. If this is the ‘vox populi’ of the modern world, it has been irreparably changed by the introduction of social media—and not necessarily for the better.

It was this concept of the ‘vacant vox populi’ that I intended to convey with my image. In keeping with the themes of popular culture and talking/listening that I kept in mind, I had the further idea of creating this image in the style of an album cover. In this vein, I envisioned an image of a famous figure, ‘defaced’ by some form of digital symbol—in a manner similar to Green Day’s album Nimrod (1997), which ‘de-faced’ black and white images with a yellow circle and the album name.

After consideration, I settled on Thomas Edison—the inventor of the phonograph, and thus, modern reproducible music—and attempted to manipulate the image using a volume icon, captured from my own Apple iPhone’s interface. This initial attempt proved somewhat successful but overall lacking, and so I decided instead to create the image in the minimalist style—playing on the semiotic significance of symbolism and representation in daily life (as discussed in the latter weeks of the subject which focused on image, type, and the ‘visual turn’), particularly in an era where icons and symbols have come to dominate human interactions (e.g. traffic signs, emojis, graphical user interfaces for digital devices).

     

The ubiquity of symbolism is a concept which my final product attempts to subvert: the central placement of the volume icon and the presence of forward and backward playback symbols disrupt our common perception of these images as built-in aspects of our interactions with digital technology. This became especially apparent to me after I showed the image to one of my peers and they mistook it for an actual volume notification.

Overall, the image conveys my sentiments about the current state of digital discourse—we find ourselves at a point where humanity has faded into the background, as shown by the invisible ‘everyman’ figure of the image; displaced by a slew of devices which keep our lives in motion, at the expense of taking over our lives.

References

Thomas Alva Edison, three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing front, c. 1900, photographed by L. Bachrach, Wikipedia, viewed 16 October 2016, <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Thomas_Edison2.jpg&gt;.

Bate, D. 2013, ‘The Digital Condition of Photography: Cameras, Computers and Display’, in M. Lister (ed.), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 2nd edn, Routledge, New York, pp. 77-95.

Green Day. 1991. Nimrod. Recorded March–July 1997. Reprise Records.

Jenkins, H., Ito, N. and Boyd, D. 2015, Participatory culture in a networked era : a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, pp. 1-31.

Lupton, E. 2010, Thinking with Type, 2nd edn, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp. 85-100.