Last weeks session was based all on Teddy Boys so today's lecture was all about haul girls and the internet. The lecture started off with a picture of models at Alexander Wang's X H&M catwalk in November 2014. The picture was of Health Goths. Then picture to me was very strange and have never seen or heard of health goths but they look a little different than this off the catwalk.
On the next slide there were another couple of subcultures - Normcore (right image) and Off White street culture (left image). Both of these since looking at the pictures I knew what both of them were.
What do subcultures mean now?
We spoke about a few things in order to think about a conclusion. We spoke about whether they even exist anymore because have millennials killed the cultures and how the world has changed? I think subcultures don't mean what they meant for example back in the 60's/70's but they definitely do still exist because not everyone looks the same when you walk through the street do they? I then started to think about whether I considered myself in a subculture and I never have but since looking the subcultures today I would say style wise I compare to the normcore culture.
How has the world changed?
We then spoke about how the world has changed. Social media and the internet is the biggest change that has happened to the world. We spoke through the facts of the internet*:
Facebook = 2.27 billion
Instagram = 1 billion
Twitter = 336 million
Pinterest = 250 million
Snapchat = 186 million
*all of these facts are based on active users, who have logged in within the last 30 days
I was quite surprised by some of the figures but then thinking about it they do all make sense. I thought Facebook would be at the top but thought that Instagram would be closer in figures because I know I definitely use Instagram a lot more than Facebook but other people obviously don't. I wasn't surprised by Twitter but I was surprised that Pinterest was used by a lot more people compared to Snapchat but I guess art based Pinterest is definitely used a lot more, nobody I doubt uses Snapchat for business.
What is a digital native?
There is two parts to a digital native. Digital immigrants and digital natives.
Digital immigrants = people who have to learn how to use the technology.
Adopters of the web technologies
Prefer to talk in person
Logical learners
Focus on one task at a time
Prefer to have interaction with one or few people rather than many
Get info from traditional news sites
Digital natives = people who have been born during or after the digital age and are bought up not knowing any different.
Born during or after the digital age
Always on, attached to phone or other device
Intuitive learners
Multitask and rapidly task-switch
Extremely social
Multimedia orientated
I am defiantly a digital native!
Gen Z/Gen Me/Gen We
All of these names stand for the same thing (Generation Z) - us becoming a generation that are coming of age which we are at the beginning and the end of as they're at polar opposite ends of the spectrum, which isn't totally digital. We are all a deeply divided group.
Digital practices
Reasons that social media is so engaging is the presence of choice:
'Filter bubble'
Blocking culture
Trolling
Democratised access to platforms
Filter bubble and blocking culture
This was first introduced by Eli Pariser in 2010 to describe how algorithms tailor content dependent on user interest.
Danger that people will only be exposed to people/content that they agree with
Has been used to explain political upsets for example, Brexit and Trump election
It basically means this practice selects you and tries to match you up. The helping to understand to people the political upset it does it this way. If people on Twitter talk about Brexit and they were saying they were all going to vote remain it makes whoever is reading that feel almost forced in a way to vote the same way. It's very persuasive.
Access for (nearly) all
'The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had'. - Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Alphabet Inc, which owns Google
After reading this quote I thought that it was quite funny that Schmidt thinks that the internet is just anarchy. Legacy media is traditional which includes examples of newspapers, radio and TV, but the traditional routes, university, family connections and money for example don't exist in digital media. All the ways to communicate by simply watching videos on Youtube, this allows marginalised groups to find each other in a digital space rather than relying on a physical space. With young people it becomes a natural space to experiment with other identities.
Hybrid indentities
In the past youth cultures required commitment whether that was time, money or appearance for example but that is no longer the case. Someone could be one culture one day and another culture another day, which is facilitated by global consumerism that allows us to buy the rewired cultural clothing and accessories. The internet is the place that informs us of these conflicting viewpoints in the first place, vapourware is an example of this.
Utopia and Dystopia
What is a utopia and a dystopia?
A utopia is an imagined community or society that possess highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. A dystopia is the opposite.
Sir Thomas More was the first person to write about a utopia describing it as 'a perfect imaginary world'
We then discussed whether it's possible for a utopia to survive in the real world? We came to the conclusion that everyone's views are too different in order to have 'a perfect world'.
Representations of utopia in the media
We looked at films and books that are in the media that have examples of utopia in them.
Back to the Future - the idea of both utopia and dystopia is really important for these films, if the characters do something bad in the past then it will affect their future negatively.
Black Mirror (precisely S3Ep4) has a dark and dystopian story. The whole programme has the idea that technology is bad and is going to ruin our lives but this episode was the opposite showing how we can use our own technology to create our own utopia.
The Hunger Games is a good film to look at because it's a semi-realistic utopia.
'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', 1984 is a book that has been inspired by Blade Runner.
'News From Nowhere', William Morris is a socialist novel where he creates his own utopia within the book
Ready Player One takes on the idea that you can exist in the real life world without technology as it takes you away from digital life.
Haul Girls
We then got on to speaking about Haul Girls. I had an idea what a haul girl was in my head but was adamant that I was wrong because I had no idea why we would be talking about that but I was actually right.
Haul Girls = girls who go out and buy clothes to film a clothing haul. They are YouTube personalities who's channels are based solely on buying things and talking about them online. Some people believe that this mass consumerism will be the downfall of society, the environment and creativity as a whole.
I wasn't too sure how this related to the arts practices and disciplines that we are all studying but I guess it's something else I've learnt about.
We then looked into veganism which is the culture of being plant based. Some people bought out a campaign for being 0% vegan and then stuck the posters all over bus stops etc which I don't really agree with because it shouldn't be forced upon people to be influenced to do something that isn't necessarily a necessity. I again didn't know what this had to with the topic of the lecture.
The final thing that we spoke about which I think links back closely to digital immigrants and natives were neo luddites, luddite and tech addicts.
Neo Luddites = skeptical about smartphone technology and want to go back to when we were less connected but don't go without using technology in their everyday lives as it is everywhere nowadays.
Luddite = comes before the industrial revolution. Don't use any technology
Tech addicts = addicted to technology and will admit freely they're addicted.
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