Time, space and value

Some years ago I read an article discussing the real values in modern society. Property and objects were losing their meaning, security, time and space were becoming the only real values.

This was such an interesting thought that I have been thinking about it ever since, when faced with displays of status-carrying objects, as it indicates that the concept of value is shifting. For a researcher playing around with non-physical objects and digital spaces, this idea of shifting values is interesting and captivating.

So now I am looking around, searching the net, searching books, trying to understand...

Don't you hate epiphanies?

Sometimes, as my sister says, "the coin falls down." You know the feeling, it's when you get the joke and you see how something works. But that's where the image ends, because you can't really talk about coins falling slowly or coins falling quickly - gravity is gravity and me being slow to realise something does not keep a coin suspended in free fall for ever.

Sometimes though, the image of coins falling is spot on, and today the coins were falling too many at the time. It was like I pulled a handle and they all came rushing - sadly not to stream into my hands and leave me rich and happy, but to cram themselves into the same little slot before I had a chance to appreciate any of them.

I had an epiphany. I have started to hate those, but it's how my research brain works. I sit around, looking at a stack of books, then I read them, randomly, looking for - something - then I write a little something totally unrelated, and I play a game and I surf online and I get involved with finding a pair of purple pants for my rogue (she really needs a pair of pretty epics, you know), and then I go listen to some lectures and before I know it time is running out. Do you think that's the stressfull part? Nooo, the stressfull part is what comes next. Because I start doing all kinds of stuff so I won't feel I have wasted my time, taking on work and booking trips and such, and THAT is when all the coins drop at the same time. Suddenly I see what I am looking for, and it's right in front of my eyes and I have to write it down NOW, but I have said yes to so many other things and I can't...

I hate it. But I live for it. Ambivalence and contradition. They feed me.

Livingstone and Jenkins

Sonia Livingstone is a quite well-published, and in media studies, well known researcher on media, audiences, youth and the use of new technology. Some of her more current work engages the concepts audience and public, and go through a wide range of discussions around these ideas and how the development of new media influence them. She approaches this from an angle of European media studies, something which is aquiring if not the status of a different discipline, then definitely a distinctive flavour of debate, discussion and the probing of concepts, ideas and theories which is different from the more sample-directed American version.

Reading Livingstone next to Henry Jenkins' work carries with it a sense of this distinction. Where Jenkins delivers interesting and knowledgeable examples of how new media changes certain interactions between users and the traditional senders, Livingstone chases down the meaning of the changes in a theoretical as well as a socialogical context. This makes reading them in combination interesting, thought-provoking and oddly satisfying, as both hint at lacks and weaknesses with the work of the others, as well as filling out and confirming other parts.

So, let this be the cocktail of the week, a tall glass of Livingstone with a dash of Jenkins, served warm and comfortable and sipped in the presence of an active, connected lap-top, for referencing and curious checks on described phenomena.