Personalization in Digital Media

Chapter 15: "Does it matter that it is digital?"

"The fact that digitized data is processed and presented on digital equipment makes digital media different from analogue media ... A basic characteristic of digital electronic systems is that they are program executions: they do things. A program execution performs a series of specified operations, processing input and transforming it to output. Digital electronic systems...often force the human operating the system to perform in particular ways and in particular systems" (274).

In his essay, Tone Bratteteig discusses the shifts from analogue to digital. Our society has come a long way -- from once being fascinated with the prospect of capturing memories as they are real in the moment, to now being somewhat adamant that editing needs to take place to make pictures look better. In a sense, technology has made us more critical of reality, choosing to hide what we do not want people to see, and emphasize what we want people to see. We are given the chance to manipulate our presentations in front of people -- and in some sense, manipulate how they think of us. As Bratteteig mentions in the quote above, digital programs "process input and transform [them] into output". If we were to think of this in terms of first impressions, we are inputting data that would produce the best first impression we can make on people as the output.

Crazy, right? Who would have known that we humans would ever be empowered to slightly adjust the truth in order to come up with what we think of as a "better truth"?

To go back to the essay, in the quote above, Bratteteig mentions somewhat subtly our conformation, as the "human operating the system," to the particular process that each system requires. This makes me think of blogging again. In the past, pen and paper journals were very much celebrated. People were encouraged to jot down their notes and keep it to themselves if they chose to. But with technology advancing, we have made the shift from pen and paper to cyber-blogging. As Bratteteig says, "digital media are dialogical, two-way media" (276). The process of cyber-blogging is not merely to post up a journal entry with the intention of keeping it to one's self. The Internet is a very public place, and posting up a journal entry, no matter how private it is meant to be, still invites public viewership, and sometimes scrutiny. That it is on the Internet frees it up for people to discuss. Public attention is part of the digital media system.

But it is only one aspect of media system performance that we as humans operating the system succumb to. Another thing about blogging is the extra knowledge we are to take on in the event that we want to customize and personalize our own blogs (I mean, come on, who wants to have a generic blog that looks exactly like someone else's? Personalities gotta shine on the web, too!). While there are preset customization options readily available for us -- like here, on Blogger/Blogspot -- we are still borrowing from someone else, albeit tweaking things a bit to reflect ourselves more. But even in minor customization, people are to know a little bit of HTML coding in order to adjust things. In this sense, we are "forced to perform in particular ways and particular systems" -- whereas with a pen and paper journal, we are free to write however way we want without having to worry about coding and getting proportions right. Because digital media is so much more convenient than analogue media, it has led us to succumb to its particular system demands that we might be able to benefit from it.