Michael Curtin’s ideas about the logic of
accumulation in his piece, Thinking Globally: From Media Imperialism to
Media Capital, were particularly interesting. Kieran Medina gave
a presentation recently discussing the enormous popularity of a Snapchat “Our
Story” about the New York Blizzard. Their research covered how with
the current culture of second screens, phone applications now have the ability
to gain as many if not more eyes than television screens and the valuable
market this potentially opens.
The Snapchat story had over 24 million views,
which put it higher than The Walking Dead
and even higher than Monday Night Football.
With such a heavy viewership, particularly in the youth market, Snapchat
seems to be able to move into a space of contemporary new media and therefore
has great potential to be used as an activist tool whether for promoting news,
resistance movements, and other social and political issues. While Snapchat is
currently ad-free, with “stories” like
the blizzard, how long will it be able to sustain an add-free space? Although
Snapchat doesn’t currently offer a necessarily valuable culture beyond
perfecting selfies, its popularity does interact with Curtain’s concept that
“over time [contemporary media] must redeploy its creative resources and
reshape its terrain of operation if it is to survive competition and enhance
profitability” (p. 5).
One of the concerns I was considering when
thinking about apps like Snapchat is the ever changing, evolving, and shrinking
of people’s attention spans. Snapchats are not only inherently short as their
name implies a double meaning referencing both the snapping of pictures and
videos as well as the limited, pre-timed, one-time viewing model of the
application. What happens to us when our
shortened attention spans start being harvested for information intended for
capital gain? It’s a dangerous and slippery slope that has been evidenced by
the waning popularity of socially apps or websites that can’t maintain enough traffic
to remain competitive. The capitalist
transition ultimately kills diversity and ingenuity. Capital has bee responsible for the demise of
politically charged media across the ages as technology and the capitalist
tradition heavy influenced the film and television industry from the levels of
production and distribution that forwent many films and shows of social value
in the aim of producing what’s popular and safe and guaranteed to turn a
profit. It seems likely that
applications, even those with political potential, will likely fall victim to
the capitalist machine.
I agree with your post, Eren. I am also thinking about the mergers and acquisitions of applications by dominating social networks. It appears that major interest is shifting towards applications and the subscribers/users, and in order to keep up with the expansive competition, capitalism must be employed to remain relevant.
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