(Broken record: this is an Amsterdam-related post.)

How primarily do the Dutch interact with their news and commercial media, and how has this shaped the general commercial structures and mediums of the industry?

In general, the most analogous conceptual framework by which this question lives is the synecdoche. The consumption of products in an economic sense drives the development and availability of those products from the supplier, and so in many ways the physical existence and prominence of media reflects synecdochically upon the consumption of media.

Through this observation, we can explore new and indirect methods of studying media consumption among the Dutch. Rather than query directly for the public usage of media, we can take the relative production of each medium as an indirect measure for that same usage data. In this way, we can get a complete picture with hard data with much less variability.

Caution must be taken, however. The premise of our question is that the consumption of media potentially shapes the production and mediums of media - that is, consumer demand drives the industry. Thus, if we simply take the numbers on the production end and infer the consumption numbers, we completely fail to address our research. In this way, it can be seen that in fact our very research question is based on the goal of addressing the extent of the synecdochical relationship between physical media existence and production and consumption.

It's been a while since a video entitled "Web 2.0 .. The Machine is Us/ing Us" circled around the web. For those of us who live in Web 2.0, who think constantly in its context, the video was nothing new, but simply provided a neat, bundled package summarizing a number of its tenets, potentials, and quandaries.

The core idea presented in the video is that of form and content. Mike Wesch, the author of the video, argues that with the advent of XHTML and RSS/ATOM, effective separation of form and content has been achieved, and information sharing has become not only easier, but a core principle of the Web, vis-à-vis Web 2.0. This is currently arguable, as the quality of code dictates the level of separation afforded in each individual instance. HTML5 is fascinating in that it provides more native mechanisms for determining these separations without sacrificing expression of form.

The point at which this conversation becomes interesting is that at which we turn the argument upon itself: what is the medium of the video? One of Wesch's more tangential (and thus questionable) assertions is that the separation of form and content has directly led to the influx of the user-generated web. What is inarguable, however, is that without the user-generated web, his video could not have possibly existed in the plane it currently does. It is thus appropriate that a video about the web is in fact a video on the web.

Likewise, Philip Thurtle, in his book The Emergence of Genetic Rationality, focuses on, among many other topics, the necessity of effective information collection, collation, and communication in the rise of certain forms of social consciousness, among them genetic rationality. In fact, in the introduction of the book, he comments on the organization and information principles followed by the book - this bit of meta draws attention to the book as the medium, as the ultimate culmination of a certain process of information processing which is perhaps the most final and arduous of them all.

On the other hand, the media in general filters out instead most commonly over the mediums of print, the web, and television. The most interesting point here is in fact the medium itself - each communicates in an entirely separate way, organizing and shaping both form and content with radically deviant methods. When ground down to these separate considerations of form and content, the concept of the television as a medium seems to become the most bipolar, and the print medium the least. When we consider the effect of the content alone, it seems that given the wealth of content on the Web, to survive in the medium means that content is of absolutely key importance.

These deviations are things to consider when considering other concepts relating to media.

In mathematics and electrical engineering, convolution is "a mathematical operator that takes two functions f and g and produces a third function that is typically viewed as a modified version of one of the original functions." Commonly, this operation is performed by taking two transformations of the same wavefunction as the operands for the process, which then analyzes the wavefunction into a new one. This process is extremely useful for analyzing linear-time systems.

Walter Benjamin, a philosopher from the early 20th century, took this concept and applied it analogously to non-mathematical cases in reality, creating several concepts about which to analyze arcades in Paris. To aid in doing this, he created a multitude of convolutes about which to focus and organize his thoughts and research.

Of these, one interesting convolute is the one he has entitled N: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress. As the media of our society is built entirely on the dissemination and manipulation of knowledge, this is of particular note and relevance to the concept of the transfer of knowledge through the media. In the spirit of Benjamin's research, the following is a short entry following his form.

---

"Over the last decade, the major firms and cultural institutions that have dominated media and information industries in the U.S. and globally have been challenged by people adopting new technologies to intervene and participate in mainstream media culture."
Lievrouw, Leah A. "Participatory Design". Ninth conference on Participatory design: Expanding boundaries in design. New York: ACM, 2006.

It seems that the "new media" is gaining legitimacy quickly. This has been aided by numerous factors: more journalistic practices being weaved within the agile framework provided by new media reporting, providing for more accountability and thus credibility within society, and increasing feedback from blogs and new media back into mainstream media - for instance, Keith Olbermann regularly quotes the Daily Kos on his program. This increased impact of new media culture and the Internet has led to a radical reshaping of how knowledge is disseminated: user-generated content is rapidly gaining mindshare, and citizen journalism is reshaping ethics and accountability. This has a profound effect on the progress of our culture.
May 2007

(Conversely:)
As competition for audience revenues intensifies in the newly competitive media environment, programmers are hoping to harness the potential of the Internet. The present study explores potential online media service access in light of motivational factors, existing media use level, home communication technology infrastructure and demographic attributes. Findings indicate that perceived gratification expectation dimensions were strong predictors of likely online media service use. Although traditional media use was largely perceived as irrelevant to online media content access, online service was seen as a functional supplement to traditional media instead of a complement or displacement mechanism. An existing communication technology cluster in the home was not found to be predictive of likely online service adoption, as it might not have been deemed "functionally interdependent" of the online service. The younger babyboomers and post-babyboomers fit the profile of a likely online media service adopter, as characterized by their age and educational level.
Lin, Carolyn A. "Perceived gratifications of online media service use among potential users". Telematics and Informatics. New York: Pergamon Press, 2002.

Our last discussion of the Waag Society was perhaps incomplete. We never did quite discover what the Waag Society is, in point of fact. So I did some more research.

And I still don't know.

The Waag Society claims to many things, and yet seems to work on projects in a completely disjunct set of many things. On their Organisation information page, they claim that their founding goal from 1994 is to exist as a "Society for old en new Media." Other mentions of the society around the web also allude to this goal. Their site continues:

The Society's -soon to be called 'Waag Society'- mission was to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality of living. After a complete restauration of the Waag building, a small group of enthousiastic idealists began their activities in 1996. [sic]

So really, it would appear that their goal was not to be so much a society for the study of old and new media, so much as the promotion and enablement of new media over old media. Now, however:

The medialab developed into an avant-gardistic thinktank whith a lot of freedom. But with an eye for commercial possibilities: attempts were made to bring Waag prototypes to the market. Waag Society grew into an institution that was active in the fields of networked art, healthcare, education and internet related issues like bandwidth and copyright.

And yet it seems like most of their projects don't reflect this new goal either, as given by example from my previous post. So, here is a question we may want to answer:

What are the Waag Society's goals, and how effectively are the methods they employ achieving those goals? What effect have they had on the media landscape in Amsterdam?

We can begin to answer this question by putting it to the Waag Society themselves - through a series of interviews with their employees as well as their customers, we should be able to develop a good understanding of the organization and its impacts. Of course, there are moral implications to this study. Most significantly, we need to ensure that we do not invade the privacy of interviewees, particularly those not directly associated with the Waag Society. This involves methods for obtaining interviews, as well as the extent of interview questions themselves. Also important is that we gain a full understanding of the Waag Society and what they do, so that we do not misrepresent them in our final research.

As a follow-up to the previous post on news sources, I'd like to comment perhaps on physical manifestations of the same concepts. Specifically, I would like to refer to the news as provided by people with a similar agenda as ours - the Waag society. While the form of media they provide is not directly what we wish to study - which is to say that what we wish to study isn't necessarily particularly extant at the moment - their quarterly magazine represents an interesting fusion between a media instance of the news and research into society.

First, we require background. The Waag society primarily - as far as I can tell - focuses on performing projects that bring forward social unity and promote social progress. For instance, as a collaboration with the India festival in Amsterdam, the society put together an event, concurrent with a companion event in Delhi, which enabled participants to explore the city as a parallel of India: the theme was that of constantly shifting urbanization. Their goal was to allow participants to explore more of both the city and society of Amsterdam, and to bring the two together into a more unified whole.

Thus, the physical manifestation of their research and activities, their magazine, represents a form of news and media which seeks to promote and sustain the Waag Society. Their goal and their magazine are thus somewhat symbiotic: the magazine exists to sustain the goal by raising and maintaining awareness of the orgainzation, and the goal exists to provide the magazine with content. This setup is somewhat unlike most other forms of media, and thus represents a very interesting fusion of the topics we seek to study whil we are in Amsterdam.

I have always been fascinated by the entirety of the news and media mechanism. Their implications on society are enormous - people need to be well-informed in order to make decisions, both personal and societal. Especially with politics, the agenda of the media is a key part of this informative process, and yet is nearly indivinable to the outsider, such as we are.

Of course, each outlet of the media has a different perspective, a different spin, a different agenda. Some are blatant, perhaps even revoltingly so, such as that of FOX "news," while other outlets are less obvious, such as the conundrum that is the government-controlled yet somehow exceptional BBC. It's hard to say with certainty about the specific agenda of most media forms and corporations. However, print, television, and radio news sources have all existed for long enough that a fair bit of analysis may be done on their archives and evolution.

One form of media that's rapidly becoming a major news outlet, and which does not have a long history, however, is the Internet. Outside of websites maintained by the major news outlets, the Internet is an extremely odd news source - I have commented before on anonymity and the Internet, and the faceless, baseless form of web media are somewhat mysterious. In addition, nothing on the web is constant - corrections, modifications, and even wholesale deletions can occur in the blink of an eye without so much as a notice. This is, of course, irresponsible journalism, but such is the power that the Internet affords. The shortcomings of the Internet also rear their heads - entire sites can vanish over time due to neglect or budget cutbacks. Thus to study the news from the web properly, we need a comprehensive archive of work built in real-time - but this is not my arena, nor my current interest: please refer instead to the work of Kirsten Foot.

Instead, since studying the news media of the web directly is so difficult, I am instead interested in the habits of people in our society. In an age where a majority of peoples' knowledge of the news comes either through the television set or through word of mouth, the transfer itself of news has become even more contextual. So, what happens when we remove that context? What happens when we take habitual people and transplant them into a foreign land, where they lack the means and mechanisms of getting news to which they are native?

Perhaps they fall back upon print media. Do they pick up a local newspaper? Do they pick up the New York Times? Or perhaps they resort to using the web. Do they read CNN.com, or something more esoteric such as The Huffington Post? How do these new habits compare to their old ones?

People like to gravitate toward the familiar, the native. The mediums and outlets to which people resort when they find themselves in a distant land says much about those mediums and outlets. If people do resort to using the web to obtain their news, then a comparison between their choices online and their choices offline at home is an effective and indirect way to study something as difficult to study as the Internet.

Photo credit: Birdfarm via flickr.