NAVIGATING HOME
In an age where technology has
consumed our standard of living, it’s very easy to confuse necessities with
luxuries. Our attachment to our cellular devices, along with other mediums, has
dictated our sense of creativity. As we move forward, we trust that these
mediums have become enhancements and necessary tools to navigate within the
world we live. However, our attachment has left us distracted from when our
lives used to be navigated by other mediums. The reliance upon technology as a
crutch has distanced us from the things that mean the most. New media, though
it lacks a focus on content, strives to put focus on the medium as a platform.
This platform initiates a message that is not based on literary meaning as we
have studied thus far this semester. In fact, the message is that of the
mediums impact and influence on the reality in which we participate in.
However, I would like to argue that in the interactive Hollow Documentary, we experience several mediums of our New Media
era in which it navigates to provide a sense of home and feeling for a specific
community that navigates their own world without these mediums. The interactive
documentary as a medium provides a way to navigate the audience and this
becomes the message. The medium as the message become clear when discussing the
films structure and content with Bogost’s Proceduralist Theories: resonance and
introspection
RESONANCE
Much
like video and board games, Hollow
Documentary provides a medium that allows for a ‘resonance’ in which the
audience experiences the actual landscape. Bogost draws upon this further that
rather than words or photos, we communicate meaning by navigating and
experience the process ourselves. The documentary gave the audience the opportunity
to swipe, click, play, listen, read, and watch a specific process at which the
community relies upon their own sources to sustain their lifestyles. In their
world, they navigate their lives minimally. They enrich their lives and dreams
by building a community. Their own medium at which they experience their
landscape is through community. Some thematic navigations as defined in their
medium are through the people and their efforts and actions in the community;
what resonates that their medium is the message is through their physical bodies.
They identify that their community doesn’t have to be the best thought they
experience financial strains; “it’s a beautiful place to live despite the ugly parts
of it.” They also proclaim that the potential to navigate their landscape is “unlimited”.
The medium at which we navigate this landscape is through advanced technology. This
medium is limited unlike the community landscape. Additionally, there is new
resonance in our ability to navigate our medium of technology because the
further it progresses, the more complicated it becomes. Yet the community lives
“simple, and that’s why they live happy… it gets in your soul.” Technology only
has a way to capture this sense of home and community from other mediums.
INTROSPECTION
Introspection
refers to the ability to look inward and reflect rather than for gratification.
One young boy in this community has high hopes for change in the future, but
his reflections are deeply rooted in the community. Much of the ghost town is
old and falling apart. As members identify their needs for improvement, their
concern is for the care of others and to give perspective. The young boy
outlines that “logic dictates that most people won’t come back… to follow your
dreams, you have to leave. But talking about the problems won’t solve them.
Young people in the schools can help solve these problems – go off and be
successful – that’s what they want us to do.” We look inside the reflections of
this community on the world that surrounds them. There are things that they “remember
from their childhood that they wish someone would’ve taken a picture… To go
back in time to document life through something new… It’s easy to write about
something you love.” Though this small community struggles, they make sure to
reflect and appreciate what they have. This comparison of such a minimalist
(yet happy) group of individuals are getting their word out through new media
that intends to cause audience members to reflect on their own lives by
interacting with it. From clicking pictures and videos to participating in
surveys and reflect on similar situations, this documentary medium initiates a
sense of home and community in both the audience and the text’s subject through
introspection.
Though our world is constructed with
vast amounts of new media, technology is not the only medium in which we see
and feel the world around us. Most documentaries attempt to provide a way to
reflect on and navigate someone else’s landscape while simultaneously
experiencing our own. The interactive documentary used technology in a way that
we could understand from our perspective someone else home and community. And just
by a click of a button, it brought two separate communities together. With our
faces away from our cell phones and Facebook, we had the opportunity to use
technology and media for good if we use it to navigate ourselves home. The medium led us to the message.
No comments:
Post a Comment