UNDER CONSTRUCTION CONSTANTLY: EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS OR TECHNOLOGICAL CATCHING UP? THE DAMNATION OF NEW MEDIA CONTENT PRODUCERS ACROSS MULTIPLE PLATFORMS
ABSTRACT
If you are a content producer the relationship with the continuous technological developments is one regulated by frustrations, challenges and excitements. To set up a framework that is both stable and permanent over the Internet is an oxymoron. The reasons that are behind this particular challenge are relatively simple – the Internet was not borne as an archival medium, it was originally a medium of display – it has increasingly become a structure used to archive and display multiple contents produced over time.
The experience of ‘stabilizing’ the presentation of content – particularly if one is concerned with design appearance and aesthetics as well as easy access – becomes a particularly problematic task. This problem is not easily solved and sees the constant task of redefining the users’ experience, re-defining the content creator methodological approaches to online display and the re-mediation and/or transmediation of content across multiple platforms.
Particularly in the case of creative content creators (artists and curators alike as well as designers and photographers) the most complex and harrowing part is the transfer of large databases of images, texts and commentaries that invariably, beside taking long time to be re-uploaded, constantly scramble in the transfer process and have to be reset – often manually.
Therefore between the process of resetting everything manually and just archiving the old website and creating one a new – the latter option is more tempting since it allows the possibility and obliges the orderly mind to re-define and re-label content, re-presenting it in a new and more suitable structure.
The so-called ‘immateriality’ of the medium allows for a constant re-organization of the library, that does not consist in a shifting of the books but in the construction of constantly new bookcases and then in the re-arranging of material within them.
The article analyzes a series of issues related to the attempt of organizing a definitive system that, like in the cases of medieval canons or encyclopedia of the French Enlightenment, proposes and presents problems that are not part of the contemporary debate on contemporary digital media and social networks. Despite the fact that websites, blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and multiple other platforms present themselves as life archival systems, there is still a lack of understanding of the conceptual canons that underpin these crowdsourcing based systems and the reality of their processes of inclusion and exclusions.
KEYWORDS
Presence, absence, death, thanatophobia, digital data, film, web 2.0, memorialization, digital humanity, eternalization
