Still jamming the echelon... but what for, really?

 

The bidirectional way Internet works opens up way for novel ways of protest  institutions or organizations, but how effective are they? In this post I'd like to take a closer look at particular practice of netizens, to which we can refer to as "jamming the echelon". What kind of collective action is it? And what goals can it help to achieve?
Those interested in conspiracy theories will instantly recall late nineties, with stories circulating about grand network of wiretaps run by the powers of Anglosphere to collect every bit and word transferred by the telephones, faxes and modems. Code-named ECHELON by an investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in 1988, it fed imagination of these who feared excessive government control and wanted to act against it. What did they do? They called for collective irritation of the system, called "Jam Echelon Day".
What did it consist in? The original post to Hacktivism mailing list proclaimed that:

On October 21, 1999, netizens around the globe are implored to send out at least one email with at least 50 keyword words. You need not be privy to knowing exactly what words Echelon uses. It is safe to assume that words such as "revolution" and "manifesto" and "revolt" [etc.] will work. Just be sure to sound as subversive as possible.

Hacktivists, or hacker-activists, believed that ECHELON contains at its core a classification mechanism, which uses set of "trigger words" to differentiate between friends and enemies, or putting it into more contemporary vocabulary, a good citizen from a terrorist. The word list was a vulnerability this "hack" would abuse - if lots of internet users started to place trigger words in their communication, they would create enough signal noise to collectively jam the whole machine. The post was followed by a link to simple word generator, which would generate phrases ready to use in the emails:

George J. Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence (CIA), told Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) about Mayotte (Indian Ocean) frenchelon station : a cryptoanarchist sent ISI (pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence)'s highly classified steganographic codes to Abu Nidal Organization (ANO a.k.a. Fatah Revolutionary Council) !

(example generated at http://www.bugbrother.com/echelon/spookwordsgenerator.html)

A protest strategy?

This collective action reminds of some protest strategies we know from offline world. Boycotts, sit-ins or more general occupation of buildings, spaces, symbolic sites. In each case there is a set of rules an individual can follow to participate. When (and only then, actually) big enough crowd amasses, the protest can reach its end. The same holds for jamming the Echelon, yet it seems that it is an operation of a different kind. Here, the internet services are not avoided (as would be with the boycott), nor telecom's buildings are blocked up by unwanted guests. The protesters do something different, something deeply connected to the medium they use and their role as prosumers: by participating in communicative pracitce (talking on the phone, sending emails, commenting on forums), they produce information consumed by avaricious entrails of Echelon. The trick or "hack" is to produce information in such a way, that it's algorithm will produce unexpected results.
There are two ways that a classification algorithm such as Echelon can fail: it can produce a false negative, or a false positive. The former means that an entity the algorithm seeks after managed to slip under the radar. The later means that algorithm yields many findings, which aren't supposed to be found in the first place. When faced with an predatory computer system such as Echelon, an obvious path is the false-negative one, namely to stay away and not be detected by it. However, in this case it wasn't probably an option: how to evade a system so vast and all-knowing? Inventors of Jam Echelon day chose the other path: persuade people to generate enough false positives, to make giant useless.

15 years later, still generating false positives...

Government surveillance and profiling is not the only threat to privacy. Surprisingly (or not) it's the corporate algorithms that are even more interested to collect every piece of "digital dandruff" we leave. The authors of AdNauseam browser add-on propose exactly same strategy to fight agains this problem.


AdNauseam - Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To from mushon on Vimeo.

AdNausem is taglined by phrase "Clicking ads so you don't have to", which summs up the functionality of the extension. When enabled, it will simulate clicks on each and every advertisement encountered by the user. This process is invisible to the user, as websites that ads link to are never opened, but not to servers that hold them or their operators. For them, the user will, to a disgusting degree, seem to love everything they advertise, clicking through it with fervor. In this case, similarly, the to-be customer classification algorithms are jammed with excess of false positives. The protest is based on very same principle: if you cannot hide from your perpetrator, blind his eyes by overproduction of information.

But how successful?

One needs to ask, how successful these strategies are? I wasn't able to reach data about people participating in Echelon Jamming or number of downloads of AdNauseam, but it is not a risky bet to say that they weren't that successful at all. For one, as with every collective action, it needs enough participants, and as with many offline initiatives, these too fail because almost no-one shows up. There is also a deeper problem: we already know that post-snowden and facebook colonized Internet is surveilled and monitored in much more complex and intrusive ways, immune to simple "hacks" performed by netizens. Perhaps we should point at some other end of this digital practice deemed to fail?
The direction I would propose is suggested by a thesis, that political problems can seldom be solved by technical means. Privacy abuse, by both government agencies or business, is a social problem that needs political debate and legal regulation. Seen in this perspective, "jamming the system" is another form of demonstration - building a community of discontent and showing its unity. In this way, it's the message that matters: one doesn't have to actually use AdNauseam while browsing; it suffices that he shares a link to its (funny) website. Equally, it doesn't matter if state surveillance systems got choked by a few paranoid cyberactivists: it matters that their strange signatures raised eyebrows of other, unaware users.

Fake followers and manipulations: the political marketing 2.0

1 in 5 people all around the world are using a social network that represents more than 1.66 billion potential targets.

Social networks politics partner or enemy?

First, we will see the different stages of political marketing and then we will discuss about the threats of thereof.

Since 2000s, political marketing is knows a new era about their communication tools. Indeed, there is a success of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and has transformed the media practices and communication policies of political parties. This new way of communication implying more and more professionalization of modern political communication and the main strategy for politicians is to get closer of their followers. The personal account of politics makes people believe between them and the politicians as should be a journalist or a newspaper. Moreover, their speeches are not distorted by some press agent in people mind.

The best example that we can give is the Barack Obama's victory in 2012. The American president used Twitter to announce his famous “four more years”. It was the message the most tweeted of the history with 20 billion posts all night long representing 327 000 tweets a minutes.

TVs, newspapers and radio are only local or national media. Thanks to Internet and its social networks do not have boarders. Using the same example, it's all around the world starting with the loyal partner David Cameron and others; congratulate the reelected president.

Not only a communication tools, twitter can also be strategic. In fact, according a study, 22% of Americans have disclosed their votes on social networks during the vote day which and constitute a good pool source for the parties.

But on the other hand, the social networks can also be one of the major threats for the politics. In fact, control a journalist’s questions or field is much easier than manage all a social network community. Everything is said, scrutinized, analyzed and interpreted commented. Manage the communication 2.0 became a priority for the politics’ staff that one its parts is dedicated to. This, show how important are these new kind of media.

We can quote now the Kevin Spicey’s series “House of cards” when the vice president looking for the resignation of the president says that politics is almost treason. We can consider the word quite strong but the meaning remains. In the politicians’ way of view, looking for more followers or likes than the opposite site deserves political leaders. In fact, all the messages posted on the social networks will touch a higher number of impacted people by the message. Moreover, the number of likes or followers can also constitute a kind of approval rating. That is why; buy Facebook likes or Tweeter followers became common in the politics world and more largely, business sphere. You do not need a number account or password or nothing to buy some likes or followers to a Chinese company, for instance. Last month, six of the remain French political leaders (former Prime Minister, Agriculture Minister and others) got between 50 000 and 60 000 more followers in only one night. Manipulation you would you like to say? I do not, four of them come from the left wing, and the two other ones belong to right wing.  War between the two main parties?  Ego war? Coincidence? Cyber activist who wanted to show political manipulations obviously?

One thing is sure, political marketing 2.0 is a reality that we have to take into consideration. When I say yes, I say the legislative power, in order to regulate and supervise this field to not manipulate people anymore. But some authorities try to fight against the abuse of these new kinds of media. For instance, in France, there is a huge debate about the regulation of twitter but it’s hard to control internet. In fact, the freedom of speech is the most important value in France but also for most countries… That is why, authorities need to find a solution to limit the abuses without to disrupt this freedom.

That is why, nobody need to don’t forget that on the one hand, Twitter or Facebook are an amazing tool for the communication and on the other hand, they are a way of manipulation… 

Universal access to music – The impact of New Media on the music industry

Universal access to music – The impact of New Media on the music industry

There hasn’t been a time in the past where music was that accessible than today. Manmade music has been existing for ages; the oldest instruments ever found are more than 35.000 years old and proof the desire for music since time immemorial. Nowadays music is actively and passively surrounding us everywhere in our daily life.  Not only scholarly researches proof that globalization and digitalization has a huge impact on the availability, distribution and production of music. There is an unmanageable quantitative offer of physical music objects like CD’s and vinyl as well as digital objects like music files, videos or movies. Due to the invention of the internet and internet-capable smartphones, New Media extends the limits of the music industry and makes music more accessible to the users like never before. It seems like centuries ago since we used tape decks recording songs of radio shows or secretly burning CD’s of the latest music. It was not that easy than today having access to an unimaginable variety of music in internet pages like youtube only a few clicks away. While you had to go to the next music store to buy the latest music of preference some time ago or find the right radio channel, there is even more variety to approach music through new technologies. Digital devices like smartphones and tablets offer a combination of different functions at the same time. At any place we are able to consume media related content like movies online or listening to music though mobile devices. 

It’s a fact that digitalization has a big impact on the globalization of the world. When we focus on various countries with different cultures we can observe cultural and social changes according to the music consumption and production. The creasing popularity of western music in Asian countries shows a change in cultural values and social behavior. Nowadays the young Japanese people for example listen mostly to western or western-influenced music. By now the disco scene for example is almost entirely dominated by this kind of foreign music. We can see that digital content is easily spread all over the world and due to New Media it is even easier to access a variety of music genres from all over the word. 

A survey of Media Insight Consulting from 2014 shows how new music is nowadays discovered. In order to understand changing music habits within the country and abroad more than 2500 citizens in the UK were asked how they discover new music. Fifty-nine percent of the respondents surprisingly said they would still listen to radio as an easy way to explore new songs. A big percentage of the people use the TV which offers a variety of music channels, shows and concerts. Almost as much as that amount obviously use the internet including youtube and social networks which make it very easy and fast to share and consume new videos and songs. The enormous flow of music related content is strongly influenced by the opportunity of active contribution via social networks.  Apps offer another way to find out more about new releases and the latest videos of the preferred band or DJ. Even though a smartphone itself as a digital device doesn’t appear in the survey, its functions include most of the ways to discover new music due to New Media and the convergence of the music availability. 

 “This circulation of media content […]”, as Henry Jenkins claims, “[…] across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders – depends heavily on consumer’s active participation.” According to Jenkins the so called convergence occurs in the heads of the consumers and users by socially interacting with other people. We can therefore situate the improved availability of music in the context of the social and cultural processes related to the convergence process which opens up new ways for the flow of music related content.

Written by Felix Goldmann

Media Exposure and the Importance of The People!

                                   Media Exposure and the Importance of The People!

In the following blog, I will be focusing on how media relies so heavily upon its fans, also known as us, the consumers of the media in our world today!
Why? Well because I think it’s important for people to be aware of how significant their media interaction is and also the consequences which are associated with it!

                                                                       Prime Example!

Remember the joker from Batman? He was a psychotic, homicidal clown who lacked any sympathy or empathy for his victims. He featured in the Batman movie, the Dark Knight, and held one of the most profound roles. Unfortunately the Joker didn’t feature in the third film, The Dark Knight Rises, due to unforeseen circumstances. The actor, who played the Joker, Heath Ledger, had sadly passed away.
Anyways, back to the point, for anyone who wasn’t aware of the joker, or Batman for that matter, most definitely had to have become aware as of July 2012.
The newest Batman Film, The Dark Knight Rises, had just been released in cinemas worldwide.
And in Colorado, USA, a 24 year old estranged medical school drop-out, James Eagan Holmes, was about to take his obsession with the Joker to the ultimate level and bring a whole new meaning to the word action packed movie.
He decided to dress up just like the frightening clown, and carry out shootings within a cinema, resulting in the death of twelve people, and injuring over fifty more.
He was fully convinced he was the Joker, and was simply just doing what the Joker in Batman would do. Go crazy.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/19/us/colorado-theater-shooting-fast-facts/

                                                            The Result…

 

Due to what had happened, the amount of people who were now aware of the Batman Franchise had just sky rocketed due to what had happened in the USA.

The media exposure regarding Batman had just grown significantly, even though they weren’t for the reasons that the producers of Batman would have hoped for.

This event was at the forefront of most News Broadcasts world-wide for quite some time after it had happened, it was talked about on every Radio Station, the front page of the majority of Commercial Newspapers and Magazines, and it even appeared as a topic of discussion in a National State Exam in my home country, Ireland.

As you can see, media has the ability to flow across so many different media pathways; it is actually incredible if you think about it!

This highlights the idea of convergence culture, where old and new media collide, or as one might say where the creator and the receiver of media collide in positive or negative ways!

So the media and consumer popularity surrounding Batman, the Joker, and the shooting in Colorado, indicates that without consumers and their active participation, media would not reach the same level of fame or acknowledgment, or maybe even not get any exposure at all!

So next time you think to yourself that you’re not important, well here is one little piece of information to remind you that yes you are. In the world of media, every single participant is essential.  Every single person contributes to the level of exposure media receives.

                                

                                           Who is the Minion? Us or the Media?

  Well, who do you think controls who? For me, I think that we, the people are the dominators for now, and the media is what we dominate. The consumers have been growing in strength for quite some time now.

Our knowledge is forever increasing and I think there is an ever present battle between the ability of the Human Mind and Technology. And in my view, even if technology did surpass the human brain regarding the depth of knowledge it possesses, the media regardless will always rely on us to give it power. 

Essentially, media participants are given power once they begin to engage with a certain sector of the media.

As Seth Godin says in his most recent Domino Book, ‘We Are All Weird’, “As soon as consumers enter the marketplace, they gain power, because power comes from choice. Consumer power is a brand new force, and it’s growing exponentially as a result of more affluence running in parallel with more choice.” http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-case-studies/the-power-of-consumer-choice-drives-social-media-importance/

Consumer participation within the media is important, and it is essential that we, the consumers continue to engage with the media, otherwise our relationship with the media could deteriorate and go backwards instead of progressing which is significant if Technology in general wants to advance.

                                                          Related Class Topic…

  

In class we talked about Henry Jenkins, his idea of Convergence Culture, and his mentioning of Sesame Street’s Bert, and the terrorist Bin Laden.

Well I believe these examples are both similar and express the same ideas. How? Well they’re both cases of convergence culture, where old meanings gather new concepts basically. And the creator and the receiver of the media clash, even if it is in a negative manner it still counts!It also shows the idea that media flows through several different media levels, as the photo shopped image of Bert and Bin Laden went from being on Anti-American protestors flags to CNN news in a short period of time.

                                                       
                                                                   Finally.

I hope this short blog has enlightened all of you regarding the idea of convergence culture, and the how significant people are in relation to media exposure.

Convergence culture is an ever growing concept in our society today, and can be seen on a daily basis. Do any examples of media exposure and its reliance on consumers come to mind after reading this blog? I hope so!

The sad side of Twitter: Cyber bullying, harassment and abuse.

The Internet can be hostile and adverse place, and Twitter is no exception.
As you all we’ll know, twitter is a social broadcast network that enables people and organizations to publicly share brief messages instantly around the world. This brings variety of users with different voices, ideas and perspectives.

Being the target of online abuse is not easy to confront with. And Twitter has sadly become a common occurrence of bullying, harassment and abuse.

One of the examples, related with the sad recent new about victims who died abroad crashed Germanwings flight. :

The message above reads: “OK, I’m going to say it: but half of Spain is hoping that the 45 Spanish surnames belong to Catalans, Basques and panchitos” The latter name is an offensive nickname for Latin Americans. The message was posted in response to the government’s announcement that there were “45 Spanish surnames” among the victims of the air crash. 

“See, see, do not make a drama, on the plane were Catalans, not people”.

Many of the messages appeared to target Catalans, inhabitants of the culturally distinct Catalonia region and regular targets for teasing in the rest of Spain. Interior Minister has ordered Spanish security forces to investigate the origins and authors of that kind of comments.

Another example: Sara Payne, the mother of murdered schoolgirl Sarah, has quit Twitter after suffering a sustained campaign of online harassment.

Sara Payne, 45, whose daughter Sarah was abducted and murdered in 2000, had been forced off the social media network after suffering online harassment.

Example from famous people: Robin Williams’s grieving daughter signed off Twitter and Instagram following her father’s tragic suicide. The reason? Trolls who taunted her – posting Photoshopped pictures said to show Williams’s body in a morgue (it was actually another man) and with bruises around his neck.

This type of behavior is not tolerate offline. Do you imagine some crazy Spanish people, for instance, on a commercial center, telling the stupid things of catalans? I don’t think so…

Can you ever imagine a situation in the office where people came up to you on a daily basis and called you fat, ugly or stupid? Can you imagine receiving emails from your work colleagues telling you they wish you were dead? 

Wich is the differents between offline and online?

In my point of view, It’s too easy and simple for the people to start bullying on Twitter. Cyberbullies, also known as trolls, create fake accounts to launch their cyber attacks against people they don’t like or they are disagree. Or maybe, they are doing the job that some enemy ordered them to do that task for attack them.

However, there are also many people who use their personal accounts to attach other people. But that people is easier to stop them than the trolls because they can finish with them by unfollowing the abusive users to stop receiving an @reply and blocking them to end any communication with that user.

Which other ways can help to avoid that kind of offenses?

Twitter has taken several major steps to stop trolls:

To avoid that kind of offenses, few days ago, twitter created a new “QualityFilter” to stop the trolls.

That feature is currently rolling out to verified users on iOS, which let them select an edited version of their notifications timeline based on factors like which other users they had the most interactions with.

From strategic standpoint, it makes sense that Twittes has made this feature available first for verified users because are usually the people with more followers(and therefore, more trolls).

Concluding, I think that the education has to improve that kind of behavior, raise the awareness of the society and the government about that kind of things are wrong and also the low has to punish harder all the trolls and people that participate on cyberbullying to ensure the safety of its users.

On the other hand, that kind of actions are creating a lot of new jobs related, for instance, with online law and psychologists.

Algorithms: secret gatekeepers on the internet

The terrorist attacks of January in France lead to a great demonstration in Paris celebrating freedom of speech. Ironically, instead of creating new rights, the antiterrorist law resulting from these events could arm investigation journalism and citizen right to privacy.

The new intelligence bill and the right of privacy protection

After the Charlie Hebdo and Hypecasher events, the shock was very important in France. A new law concerning surveillance was announced by the Prime Minister Manuel Valls a few weeks after the attack. This new intelligence bill is currently examined by the National Assembly (one of the chambers of the French Parliament). It prescribes a lot of measures which increase the powers of secret services, and it raises a tense debate in French society.

The most criticized measure is the use of “black boxes”, which will be installed at French telecom operators. These systems are algorithms, which reveal automatically people having a suspicious behavior on the internet, such as visiting or participate on jihadist websites, having contacts with presumed terrorists, etc. Once these people are identified, secret services would be able to access their private information. This law project is very unwelcomed, to say the least. Some French host companies are opposed to the bill and threaten to leave the country if it is adopted. Even Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper used by the government to justify such a restrictive measure, strongly criticized this use of “black boxes”. The project is not only perceived as inefficient, but also as intrusive in citizens’ private life. Anyone could be suspected and watched by secret services, even those who study terrorism in order to fight it.

 The paradox of the post-Charlie France: dialogue between opponents and partisans of a more watched environment.

Indeed, algorithms are not very clever. These systems are used to have a look on a huge content of information. An algorithm acts mechanically and cannot replace human expertise. It won’t make any difference between an actual potential terrorist and a journalist investigating on these issues. If journalists are watched, it threatens the secret of their sources and makes their work more complicated. More generally, this could be a threat for citizens who maybe were just searching for deep information, who will have their right to protection of private life and private information restricted.

Social networks and the protection of freedom of speech

Algorithms are often used in internet regulation; it is thus already possible to see what their limits are and foresee the problems that could face secret services in their struggle against terrorism through algorithms. Social networks use algorithms to control huge amount of content, which is used, produced and distributed by users on these platforms. Social networks are often criticized for blocking content mechanically, and it arms sometimes freedom of speech. Facebook is known to block nudes, which sometimes leads to suppression of art pictures (Facebook will go to court after blocking the account of a French professor who posted the picture “The origin of the world” by Courbet) and even breast cancer campaign, because algorithms automatically recognized it as pornography. It is also difficult to suppress flags of IS thanks to these systems, because the risk is to also block content such as news, articles, or people posts denouncing the organization for example. That’s why it is also impossible to use algorithms to block offensive hashtags, because reused by people who denounce the ones who used them in the first place, as it was the case with #jesuiskouachi, tweeted more by opponents to the attack than actual supporters of the Kouachi brothers, the authors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. We see here that algorithms have their drawbacks and cannot be as effective as case by case examination.

”The origin of the world” by the realist painter Courbet was censored by Facebook.

The biggest issue of internet regulation is here. Is has become very difficult to control information online because of the evolution of new media. Now, as Axel Bruns stresses, internet users become also producers of content, which leads to a huge amount of different information and to blurred lines between amateurs and specialists, or journalists. It is particularly the case on social networks, were user produce, use and share contents. Algorithms are used to regulate this huge amount of information. This is a big change compared to what was regulation of content in traditional media. The specific context in which information could be consumed and the knowledge of who constitute audiences lead to regulation according to a specific context, namely if the information would be consumed in private or not, if children are susceptible to watch, etc. This context now changed completely, because it is possible to have access to content on different platforms, an aspect of the convergence of media phenomena explained by Henry Jenkins, and possible to access that content anytime thanks to internet. Moreover, newspapers, radio stations or TV channels take time to justify the content they publish, and explain their choice according to ethics of journalism. Social networks refer to their guidelines but won’t always justify why they suppress some content or not. Due to professional secret, we don’t know how their algorithms works, which content they target according to which ethics and moral principles.

The French media specialist Olivier Ertzscheid explains that social networks’ guidelines work  as the only law online and denounces the obscurity around algorithms used to make this rules respected. Who finally decides the content targeted? It is difficult to imagine that so much power on information received by more and more people around the globe can be decided by some unknown actors according to obscure moral principles. This could possibly arm freedom of speech, as Instagram illustrated recently by censoring a picture of a girl having period blood on her clothes and bed. This picture belonged to the project of the artist Rupi Kaur whose aim was to demystify periods and denounce the taboo around it, and was finally allowed by the social network which recognized its “mistake”.

The algorithms raise the questions of the issue of freedom of speech concerning social networks and the issue of privacy concerning French new intelligence bill. The extension of information we are exposed to makes it difficult for public powers to find efficient ways to fight terrorism or, for example, pedophilia, without any restriction of fundamental freedoms. In France, the system of algorithms used by social networks to spot unappropriated content would be used by secret services to spot “unappropriated behavior” through French operators. The limits would be the same, as Facebook interprets breast cancer campaign as pornography, these algorithms would be likely to commit mistakes too. And French secret services actually don't need more targeted surveillance to commit mistakes: before the Charlie Hebdo attack, secret services confused the address of one of the Kouachi brothers with the one of an homonym who was…a 81 year-old man. 

Virtual expeditions to museums

At the 17th of March this year, a new app has entered our world, called Impasto Art. This app brings masterpieces from the finest museums to the screen of your TV. While connecting your smartphone with your smartTV, streaming masterworks such as Girl with a Pearl Earring in original size is made possible. Of course, this possibility depends on the size of your screen, however, you now can enhance your living room, office or restaurant with every art you like. The images are in Full-HD, and offered in high resolution, free and worldwide available via IPhone.

Google Art

Linked to this new application is Google Art, an app that is part of the Google Cultural Institute.They updated this app last Thursday, to expand the online database from 2D art from whole world to at least 300 masterpieces in 3D. Scan technology of Google makes it possible to zoom from different perspectives into a certain piece of art. Audio tours and videos bring the audience into contact with museum collections and street art, besides it is made possible to watch an online-guided tour trough several museums.

With the use of this kind of digital art technology, high cultural productions, masterpieces and art from whole world comes to the living space of the audience. We don't have to travel and to pay a ticket for museums anymore. We now can see the catalogues from museums in for instance England and US in one day while drinking our coffee or lying in our bed before going to sleep.

Thus, the good thing is that people who don't have the money to pay tickets, to travel or are physically disabled, can see every piece of art from home. The access to art has become less regulated and more open. On the other hand, this digitalization of art, and replacement of its context into our personal situations, has some consequences of how we might interpret certain values on the original object. Does this now is transformed in just a sample of reproduction? If the digital spread of the image itself is overruling the value of original pieces of art, what is the function of museums in the future?

I have to admit the fact that this technology is come up while we already spread the image and its original context by reproducing pieces of art on pillows, paperwork, clothes, bags, pictures and so on. Walter Benjamin (1935) who is a scholar of Frankfurt School has his theories about this question of authenticity when the age of mechanical reproduction has begun:

'Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.'

Visiting a Museum

I wander how this new media platform of spreading art is influencing our behavior of visiting museums. It is possible the popularity of art will arise and more people will spend their spare time with family and friends to visit museums. First reason: The expanding images of masterpieces whether 2D or 3D into the lives of the public, could make this public curious to the element which is lacking, described by Benjamin. Furthermore, the design, idea and production of Impasto Art and Google Art is founded by museums and art-institutions, to expand the knowledge of art, or in other words, to promote their collection. The only thing the public has to do is downloading the app and clicking several times on their mouse, to explore the world of art, collected in the digital media.

What about the artist itself? Historical masterpieces are made by people who don't exist anymore, however, if my fantasy starts running, maybe in the future they can get involved in designing the online world of art by for instance creating certain forums where fans can discuss their experience of watching, adding videos online where they promote their online images and asking people to go visiting the original work after exploring the image online. To get the public more active, it would be great to create the possibility to add self-made pieces of art to the database. By collecting information about the popularity of certain online images, museums can use this information by their decisions to organize exhibitions. In this way the system of producing, spreading and visiting masterpieces and mainstream art resembles the way music is taking place in popular culture. The original song written and played by musicians is spread by different media platforms, and via trans media transformed into times and places that differs from the original song, and gives new meanings to the sounds.  Ending this analyzation of Impasto Art and Google Art positively, virtual worlds of art opens many possibilities to create a platform of creativity, which increases the power of the public in regulation of creating collecting and distributing art.