http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/stephaniec part of the MSc in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:05:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/stephaniec/2013/01/17/consumption/ http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/stephaniec/2013/01/17/consumption/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:43:00 +0000 Steph Carr http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/stephaniec/2013/01/17/consumption/ Whilst i agree with Michael that ‘I find this disgusting’, I’m also struck by how this clip could be seen as a commentary on some of the themes of digital culture. There’s a (very messy) blurring of Michael’s identity – is he human or is he a game character? If we see Michael as a metaphor for society could this be a symbol of the postmodern instability or Bauman’s liquid modernity? This scene takes place in what appears to be a normal, everyday restaurant – perhaps suggestive of the ubiquitousness of the society/tech mix of Greenfields ‘everyware’, which Hand (2008) uses in the title of his chapter. And Michael consumes – literally ! What is interesting for me here, is that the product that he consumes, he then transforms into something with an entirely different meaning. This could be a metaphor for the reshaping of digital artefacts, as Hand (2008) suggests ‘ they [cultural products] can be rewritten by consumers and indeed producers increasingly expect this to be so’ (p.27). Finally, there is indecision as to whether his gorging is good/bad/natural/inevitable – perhaps this could be read as a metaphor for the tensions between utopian and dystopian thinking.

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