ADVANCEDNEW MEDIA

a january term independent study

»» the beginning ««

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Like many people my age, my relationship with digital media began in the dark ages of the internet and email, before CDs replaced 3 and 1/2'' floppy disk drives. I played Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Reader Rabbit. I knew a few lines of code for DOS. I have been growing up alongside the expansion and growth of technology and the digital world. For me and my generation, the language of the computer is as familiar as our childhoods.

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Command Prompt

<alvarezg@stolaf.edu>

Thoughts about January

After setting up an independent study, I began developing ideas I would explore for the month. I wanted to learn and harness the documentary power of new media tools in order to draw attention to certain questions I have about how the age of technology works: I wondered how new media has affected our identities, how digital photogra-phy has changed The Image, and if we have taken aspects of our digital experience for granted.

For my first project, I decided to tackle a part of our new media vocabulary that I percieved to be a natu-ral (and thus easily overlooked) concept: tagging. “Tag-ging” in a rudamentary sense, is the physical extension of a mental process of categorzing and organizing. Facebook tagging digitizes a process of connecting a person’s name to their image. This process doesn’t seem related to categorizing, but Facebook users have begun to apply tags to words, symbols, and images NOT relating to the appearance of users. Tagging is being brought full-circle, and is now being used to simplify users into a single category. I wanted to complete the circle, moving the inter-face and act of “tagging” out of the digital world and make the process a physical act of applying a label.