What is Digital Society?

In a Digital Society, multimedia content is accessed, shared, utilized, and

created by millions of individuals. Digital technologies are a key feature of
contemporary daily life and they profoundly shape how we live and how we
understand ourselves and our culture. Many aspects of everyday life, work,
politics, and culture have become mediated by information and
communications technology. Use of these technologies effectively becomes a
requirement of life (necessary to fully participate as citizens).

- Information Communication Technologies (ICT): Ex. internet, hand held

devices (cellphones), etc. They provide access to information helps us
understand the digital society.

- Behaviours are influenced by technology. The things we do with technology

shapes our behaviours. Ex. New kinds of friendships that are mediated
through digital technology.

ICT’s play a role in actions carried out in politics, schools and they give us
understanding of digital society.
We are made to rely on technology and
social media applications. They make us who we are and have become a part
of our culture. For example: in school, technology is now needed in order to be
involved with your courses and to submit most assignments.

The internet is everywhere, we now can seamlessly connect to it. Most apps
require internet to function. The internet is central to digital culture.

In 2011, a United Nations Report declared that when having access to the
internet in onestep, you also need a literacy/ understanding of the internet.
Access to the Internet is a human right.

The ruling stated that disconnecting people from the Internet is a human
rights violation and against international law.
What is Multimedia?

Forms of experimentation to see the world in different ways. The combination

of diverse media, especially electronic media, into a coherent communicative
or expressive object or experience. Multimedia includes: video, audio,
animation, graphics, interactive web pages, digital games, interactive art,
surveillance art, data visualizations, kinetic sculpture, locative media, spatial
practices, video and sound installations, bio art, cybernetic orchestras, live DJ
performance, database documentaries, and more. As ‘technologies of
observation’: artists and cultural producers experiment with multimedia in
order to see the world in novel and interesting ways.

“The Medium is still the Message” - Marshall McLuhan
Means the form of

which the message is communicated influences how the message is
perceived.
McLuhan talked about the future of our media world being
interconnected. How something is represented affects how we understand
it.
All media technologies have unique qualities and capabilities that
contribute to the conception, presentation, and reception.

Video art

An artist couldn't use a video camera and take it out into the world, it was
stationary.
All the major television networks had prime time schedules and
everything was pre-recorded. Artists saw the broadcast model and saw the
potential of television advertising/ video art. Video allowed artists to create
content more quickly than film.
Video art is pushing the limit of the
form.
David Antin wrote in 1968: “Video: The Distinctive Features of the
Medium”.
The article looks at what features are unique to video and how
video artists were exploring both the physical properties of the medium as
well as the conventions surrounding video usage (at that point, through
broadcast television). What are ‘distinctive features’? All media

technologies have unique qualities and capabilities that contribute to the the
conception, presentation, and reception of a message. There is a relationship
between form and content.
Electronic superhighway is made up of many electronics and contains
different media content specific to each state.

Multimedia artists use a medium or technology to communicate a message

about an observation of the world. How you create that message will be an
interplay between form and content.