To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Unified Virtual Memory.

Journal articles on the topic 'Unified Virtual Memory'

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles

Select a source type:

Consult the top 25 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Unified Virtual Memory.'

Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.

You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.

Browse journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.

1

Elvir, Miguel, Avelino J. Gonzalez, Christopher Walls, and Bryan Wilder. "Remembering a Conversation – A Conversational Memory Architecture for Embodied Conversational Agents." Journal of Intelligent Systems 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jisys-2015-0094.

Full text
Abstract:
AbstractThis paper addresses the role of conversational memory in Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). It describes an investigation into developing such a memory architecture and integrating it into an ECA. ECAs are virtual agents whose purpose is to engage in conversations with human users, typically through natural language speech. While several works in the literature seek to produce viable ECA dialog architectures, only a few authors have addressed the episodic memory architectures in conversational agents and their role in enhancing their intelligence. In this work, we propose, implement, and test a unified episodic memory architecture for ECAs. We describe a process that determines the prevalent contexts in the conversations obtained from the interactions. The process presented demonstrates the use of multiple techniques to extract and store relevant snippets from long conversations, most of whose contents are unremarkable and need not be remembered. The mechanisms used to store, retrieve, and recall episodes from previous conversations are presented and discussed. Finally, we test our episodic memory architecture to assess its effectiveness. The results indicate moderate success in some aspects of the memory-enhanced ECAs, as well as some work still to be done in other aspects.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
2

Zaidi, Taskeen, and Rampratap Rampratap. "Virtual Machine Allocation Policy in Cloud Computing Environment using CloudSim." International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) 8, no. 1 (February 1, 2018): 344. http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v8i1.pp344-354.

Full text
Abstract:
Cloud computing has been widely accepted by the researchers for the web applications. During the past years, distributed computing replaced the centralized computing and finally turned towards the cloud computing. One can see lots of applications of cloud computing like online sale and purchase, social networking web pages, country wide virtual classes, digital libraries, sharing of pathological research labs, supercomputing and many more. Creating and allocating VMs to applications use virtualization concept. Resource allocates policies and load balancing polices play an important role in managing and allocating resources as per application request in a cloud computing environment. Cloud analyst is a GUI tool that simulates the cloud-computing environment. In the present work, the cloud servers are arranged through step network and a UML model for a minimization of energy consumption by processor, dynamic random access memory, hard disk, electrical components and mother board is developed. A well Unified Modeling Language is used for design of a class diagram. Response time and internet characteristics have been demonstrated and computed results are depicted in the form of tables and graphs using the cloud analyst simulation tool.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
3

González, Marc, and Enric Morancho. "Multi-GPU systems and Unified Virtual Memory for scientific applications: The case of the NAS multi-zone parallel benchmarks." Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 158 (December 2021): 138–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2021.08.001.

Full text
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
4

Abraham, Nathan Luke, Alexander T. Archibald, Paul Cresswell, Sam Cusworth, Mohit Dalvi, David Matthews, Steven Wardle, and Stuart Whitehouse. "Using a virtual machine environment for developing, testing, and training for the UM-UKCA composition-climate model, using Unified Model version 10.9 and above." Geoscientific Model Development 11, no. 9 (September 6, 2018): 3647–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-3647-2018.

Full text
Abstract:
Abstract. The Met Office Unified Model (UM) is a state-of-the-art weather and climate model that is used operationally worldwide. UKCA is the chemistry and aerosol sub model of the UM that enables interactive composition and physical atmosphere interactions, but which adds an additional 120 000 lines of code to the model. Ensuring that the UM code and UM-UKCA (the UM running with interactive chemistry and aerosols) is well tested is thus essential. While a comprehensive test harness is in place at the Met Office and partner sites to aid in development, this is not available to many UM users. Recently, the Met Office have made available a virtual machine environment that can be used to run the UM on a desktop or laptop PC. Here we describe the development of a UM-UKCA configuration that is able to run within this virtual machine while only needing 6 GB of memory, before discussing the applications of this system for model development, testing, and training.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
5

Macchiarella, Nickolas D., Dahai Liu, Sathya N. Gangadharan, Dennis A. Vincenzi, and Anthony E. Majoros. "Augmented Reality as a Training Medium for Aviation/Aerospace Application." Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 49, no. 25 (September 2005): 2174–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/154193120504902512.

Full text
Abstract:
Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to transform aviation/aerospace training by creating new mixed reality worlds that serve as a medium for gaining work related skills. AR is a mixed reality environment generated through machine vision and computer graphics technology that merges real and virtual objects in unified, spatially integrated scenes. Using AR to develop augmented scenes in a highly memorable framework can complement human information processing, and such a complement can reveal itself in training efficiency applicable to a wide variety of work related tasks. This research determined that AR-based learning affects long term memory by reducing the amount of information forgotten after a seven day intervening time between immediate recall testing and long term retention recall testing. Continuing research in the field of AR applications for training is necessary because of human variabilities, the potential for increased learning performance and significant decreases in training time.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
6

Kim, Sungwook. "Cooperative Game-Based Virtual Machine Resource Allocation Algorithms in Cloud Data Centers." Mobile Information Systems 2020 (March 16, 2020): 1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2020/9840198.

Full text
Abstract:
With the growing demand of cloud services, cloud data centers (CDCs) can provide flexible resource provisioning in order to accommodate the workload demand. In CDCs, the virtual machine (VM) resource allocation problem is an important and challenging issue to provide efficient infrastructure services. In this paper, we propose a unified resource allocation scheme for VMs in the CDC system. To provide a fair-efficient solution, we concentrate on the basic concept of Shapley value and adopt its variations to effectively allocate CDC resources. Based on the characteristics of value solutions, we develop novel CPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth resource allocation algorithms. To practically implement our algorithms, application types are assumed as cooperative game players, and different value solutions are applied to optimize the resource utilization. Therefore, our four resource allocation algorithms are jointly combined as a novel fourfold game model and take various benefits in a rational way through the cascade interactions while solving comprehensively some control issues. To ensure the growing demand of cloud services, this feature can leverage the full synergy of different value solutions. To check the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed scheme, we conduct extensive simulations. The simulation results show that our algorithms have significant performance improvement compared to the existing state-of-the-art protocols. Finally, we summarize our cooperative game-based approach and discuss possible major research issues for the future challenges about the cloud-assisted DC resource allocation paradigm.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
7

Vella, Daniel, and Magdalena Cielecka. "“You Won’t Even Know Who You Are Anymore”: Bakthinian Polyphony and the Challenge to the Ludic Subject in Disco Elysium." Baltic Screen Media Review 9, no. 1 (December 1, 2021): 90–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/bsmr-2021-0009.

Full text
Abstract:
Abstract When approaches to the notion of the ‘self’ as it exists in the game have been discussed in game studies – for instance, through work in existential ludology or through discussions of agency – the ‘self’ in question, explicitly or implicitly, has tended to be the rational, stable, unified and coherent self of the humanist tradition. By fracturing the ludic subject into a set of contrasting and conflicting voices, each with their own apparent motivations and goals, Disco Elysium presents a challenge to this singular and unified understanding of selfhood. That this challenge is situated within the representation of a figure who, at face value, seems to represent the very locus of the authoritative, self-possessed subjectivity of humanism – not only a straight, middle-aged white man, but also a figure of police and colonial authority – strengthens the game’s critical slant. Drawing on theories of ludic and virtual subjectivity, this paper will approach Disco Elysium with a focus on this undermining of stable and unitary understanding of subjectivity. First, the game will be considered in relation to the tradition of film noir, and the way the genre both established and subverted the figure of the detective as the avatar of stable, rational, authoritative masculine selfhood. Next, its treatment of the theme of amnesia will be considered, drawing a parallel to Jayemanne’s (2017) reading of Planescape: Torment to examine how the loss of memory creates structures of discontinuity and rupture in the represented ludic self. Finally, Bakhtinian notions of polyphony will be invoked to address the game’s plurality of different voices not (as it is usually present) in a dialogue between individual subjects but within a single, fragmented subjectivity.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
8

Varnienė-Janssen, Regina, and Albertas Šermokas. "Ontologies and Technologies for Integrating and Accessing Digital Cultural Heritage: Lithuanian Approach." Informacijos mokslai 88 (April 29, 2020): 66–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/im.2020.88.32.

Full text
Abstract:
Web technologies are the key for the implementing and ensuring the full range of user needs in the digital age. On the other hand, the issue of unified representation of digital content from diverse memory institutions in order to ensure semantic integrity still remains a matter of urgency. Semantic interoperability of information and data is essential in an integrated system. In this paper, we analyze and describe an ontology-based metadata interoperability approach and how this approach could be applied for memory institution data from diverse sources which do not support ontologies. In particular, we describe the use of the CIDOC CRM ontology as a mediating schema within Lithuania’s Information System of the Virtual Electronic Heritage (hereinafter ”VEPIS”) The paper introduces the role of the CIDOC CRM based Thesaurus of Personal Names, Geographical Names and Historical Chronology (hereinafter “BAVIC”), which operates as a core ontology within VEPIS by allowing to understand things and relationships between things as well as identify the time and space of things. The paper also focuses on trust of the cultural information on the Web. Users make trust judgments based on provenance that may or may not be explicitly offered to them. In particular, we describe how provenance is managed within digital preservation and access processes within VEPIS and define whether this management meets the W3C Provenance Incubator Group’s Requirements for Provenance on the Web. The paper is based on the results of the research initiated in 2018–2019 at the Faculty of Communication and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Vilnius University by authors of this paper.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
9

Bosse, Stefan. "PSciLab: An Unified Distributed and Parallel Software Framework for Data Analysis, Simulation and Machine Learning—Design Practice, Software Architecture, and User Experience." Applied Sciences 12, no. 6 (March 11, 2022): 2887. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app12062887.

Full text
Abstract:
In this paper, a hybrid distributed-parallel cluster software framework for heterogeneous computer networks is introduced that supports simulation, data analysis, and machine learning (ML), using widely available JavaScript virtual machines (VM) and web browsers to accommodate the working load. This work addresses parallelism, primarily on a control-path level and partially on a data-path level, targeting different classes of numerical problems that can be either data-partitioned or replicated. These are composed of a set of interacting worker processes that can be easily parallelized or distributed, e.g., for large-scale multi-element simulation or ML. Their suitability and scalability for static and dynamic problems are experimentally investigated regarding the proposed multi-process and communication architecture, as well as data management using customized SQL databases with network access. The framework consists of a set of tools and libraries, mainly the WorkBook (processed by a web browser) and the WorkShell (processed by node.js). It can be seen that the proposed distributed-parallel multi-process approach, with a dedicated set of inter-process communication methods (message- and shared-memory-based), scales up efficiently according to problem size and the number of processes. Finally, it is demonstrated that this JavaScript-based approach for exploiting parallelism can be used easily by any typical numerical programmer or data analyst and does not require any special knowledge about parallel and distributed systems and their interaction. The study is also focused on VM processing.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
10

Keel, Paul E. "Ewall: A Visual Analytics Environment for Collaborative Sense-Making." Information Visualization 6, no. 1 (January 11, 2007): 48–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ivs.9500142.

Full text
Abstract:
We introduce EWall, an experimental visual analytics environment for the support of remote-collaborative sense-making activities. EWall is designed to foster and support ‘ object focused thinking’, where users represent and understand information as objects, construct and recognize contextual relationships among objects, as well as communicate through objects. EWall also offers a unified infrastructure for the implementation and testing of computational agents that consolidate user contributions and manage the flow of information among users through the creation and management of a ‘ virtual transactive memory’. EWall users operate their individual graphical interfaces to collect, abstract, organize and comprehend task-relevant information relative to their areas of expertise. A first type of computational agents infers possible relationships among information items through the analysis of the spatial and temporal organization and collaborative use of information. All information items and relationships converge in a shared database. A second type of computational agents evaluates the contents of the shared database and provides individual users with a customized selection of potentially relevant information. A learning mechanism allows the computational agents to adapt to particular users and circumstances. EWall is designed to enable individual users to navigate vast amounts of shared information effectively and help remotely dispersed team members combine their contributions, work independently without diverting from common objectives, and minimize the necessary amount of verbal communication.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
11

Barreiro Megino, Fernando Harald, Aleksandr Alekseev, Frank Berghaus, David Cameron, Kaushik De, Andrej Filipcic, Ivan Glushkov, FaHui Lin, Tadashi Maeno, and Nicolò Magini. "Managing the ATLAS Grid through Harvester." EPJ Web of Conferences 245 (2020): 03010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202024503010.

Full text
Abstract:
ATLAS Computing Management has identified the migration of all computing resources to Harvester, PanDA’s new workload submission engine, as a critical milestone for LHC Run 3 and 4. This contribution will focus on the Grid migration to Harvester. We have built a redundant architecture based on CERN IT’s common offerings (e.g. Openstack Virtual Machines and Database on Demand) to run the necessary Harvester and HTCondor services, capable of sustaining the load of O(1M) workers on the Grid per day. We have reviewed the ATLAS Grid region by region and moved as much possible away from blind worker submission, where multiple queues (e.g. single core, multi core, high memory) compete for resources on a site. Instead we have migrated towards more intelligent models that use information and priorities from the central PanDA workload management system and stream the right number of workers of each category to a unified queue while keeping late binding to the jobs. We will also describe our enhanced monitoring and analytics framework. Worker and job information is synchronized with minimal delays to a CERN IT provided ElasticSearch repository, where we can interact with dashboards to follow submission progress, discover site issues (e.g. broken Compute Elements) or spot empty workers. The result is a much more efficient usage of the Grid resources with smart, built-in monitoring of resources.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
12

Zubkov, V. V. "Methodological approaches to formation of transport and information space in the development of clusters of integrated transport services." Herald of the Ural State University of Railway Transport, no. 4 (2022): 10–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.20291/2079-0392-2022-4-10-20.

Full text
Abstract:
In this paper, methodological approaches to formation of transport and information space in the development of clusters of integrated transport services based on a multi-agent construction method are considered. The scheme of inter-cluster subject mutual integration based on implementation of unified technological (transport and production) processes is presented. The model of the system of subject mutual integration in the single transport and information space of the cluster of integrated transport services has been developed. Methodology for constructing a matrix of indicators in the system of determining and recognizing optimal solutions based on the ratio of three-dimensional cubes has been formed. The information architecture of the environment of subject mutual integration is proposed, based on the multi-agent method of construction and displaying specific properties, culture of information behavior, memory and goals, uniqueness of definition and recognition of management decisions. A three-level model of the algorithm of subject mutual integration has been developed, which establishes the procedure of actions aimed at achieving continuous integration and updating of a single knowledge database, along with this, the knowledge gained is used as an information resource opportunity in the development of production entities and regions. Methodological approaches to the construction of the transport and information space provide the basis for virtual subjective mutual integration, transformation of automated control systems into information and intelligent systems.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
13

Chatterjee, Subarna, Meena Jagadeesan, Wilson Qin, and Stratos Idreos. "Cosine." Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 15, no. 1 (September 2021): 112–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.14778/3485450.3485461.

Full text
Abstract:
We present a self-designing key-value storage engine, Cosine, which can always take the shape of the close to "perfect" engine architecture given an input workload, a cloud budget, a target performance, and required cloud SLAs. By identifying and formalizing the first principles of storage engine layouts and core key-value algorithms, Cosine constructs a massive design space comprising of sextillion (10 36 ) possible storage engine designs over a diverse space of hardware and cloud pricing policies for three cloud providers - AWS, GCP, and Azure. Cosine spans across diverse designs such as Log-Structured Merge-trees, B-trees, Log-Structured Hash-tables, in-memory accelerators for filters and indexes as well as trillions of hybrid designs that do not appear in the literature or industry but emerge as valid combinations of the above. Cosine includes a unified distribution-aware I/O model and a learned concurrency-aware CPU model that with high accuracy can calculate the performance and cloud cost of any possible design on any workload and virtual machines. Cosine can then search through that space in a matter of seconds to find the best design and materializes the actual code of the resulting storage engine design using a templated Rust implementation. We demonstrate that on average Cosine outperforms state-of-the-art storage engines such as write-optimized RocksDB, read-optimized WiredTiger, and very write-optimized FASTER by 53x, 25x, and 20x, respectively, for diverse workloads, data sizes, and cloud budgets across all YCSB core workloads and many variants.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
14

Konyukhov, Ivan, and Vladimir Konyukhov. "Cyber-physical system for control the heat and mass transfer in the oil reservoir and producing pumping well." Cybernetics and Physics, Volume 8, 2019, Number 3 (November 30, 2019): 137–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.35470/2226-4116-2019-8-3-137-142.

Full text
Abstract:
A special cyber-physical system is developed to control transient heat and mass transfer during the commissioning of the unified oil production complex consisted of oil reservoir, producing well equipped with electric submersible centrifugal pump, well production tree and ground-based control station. Two main elements of cyber-physical system are following: – computer simulator of heat and mass transfer in virtual oil production complex based on mathematical and numerical models of such processes along with simultaneous visualization of computational results; – portable imitation hardware of real ground-based equipment which is realized as 3D-printed plastic model consisted of control elements (pipeline valves, drossel chamber, ground-based control station) and recording devices (manometers, level indicator, liquid sampler and control station itself). Mechanisms of these elements are replaced by Arduino microchips to simulate the operation of real devices. An important feature of the cyber-physical system is the data exchange and interaction between oil production computer simulator and microcontroller software. Data transfer is going through the COM-ports of computer and microcontroller. The simulator sends calculated working characteristics of oil production complex to the memory of microcontroller, which not only analyzes incoming data but also displays it on the recording devices and forms necessary control parameters, which are sent back to simulator and affect the further behavior of the whole complex. Different elements of the CPS provides the possibility to control and visualize the commissioning of the oil production complex under consideration and the whole system is oriented to simulate the real technological actions performing by specialists in oil production.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
15

Мельник, Леонід, Олександр Маценко, Людмила Калініченко, Артем Голуб, and Ірина Сотник. "INSTRUMENTS FOR ENSURING THE PHASE TRANSITION OF ECONOMIC SYSTEMS TO MANAGEMENT BASED ON INDUSTRIES 3.0, 4.0, 5.0." Mechanism of an economic regulation, no. 1(99) (March 10, 2023): 34–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.32782/mer.2023.99.06.

Full text
Abstract:
The article develops the concept of key categories related to the phase transition to a new socio-economic formation: industrial revolutions Industries 3.0, 4.0, 5.0; the transition implementation mechanism; transformational processes; trialectic mechanisms of system formation. The key features of the economic system, which can be formed through a phase transition, are conditionally characterized. In particular, such an economy can be called a sustainable economy because it ensures the achievement of sustainable development goals. The essence of modern industrial revolutions (Industries 3.0, 4.0, 5.0) is revealed through which the specified phase transition is realized. In particular, Industries 5.0 is a phenomenon of human adaptation to a cybergized environment, during which the personal basis of a person develops, in particular, based on the synergistic integration of human cognitive abilities and artificial intelligence, as well as human biological nature and technical means. Based on a trialectic view of the system-forming factors of the beginning (material, informational and synergistic), the key groups of instruments for ensuring the specified phase transition were characterized, in particular, the group of instruments that provide the material prerequisites for the implementation of the phase transition can include: the introduction of alternative energy; large-scale energy accumulation; implementation of additive technologies (3D printing); formation of cyber-physical systems; implementation of the Internet of Things; miniaturization of economic assets. In the group of information prerequisites, the following instruments can be listed: mass computerization; sensory revolution; dematerialization of economic systems; the formation of the cloud as a global memory system and a global control centre; mass adoption of RFID tags. The group for ensuring synergistic prerequisites consists of globalization of Internet communications; creation of EnerNet (unified information and energy systems); creation of a global GPS; transition to network economic systems; formation of virtual enterprises.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
16

Panwar, Avnish. "Improved QoS in Fog Computing by Efficient Resource Allocation in an Internet of Things Environment." Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT) 9, no. 3 (December 17, 2018): 1082–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.17762/turcomat.v9i3.13897.

Full text
Abstract:
Large-scale application migration to fog computing is now being seen in the IT industry. The IoT is a prototype for connecting everyday objects to the web, such as sensors, gadgets (including those used in healthcare), and smart cameras. By analysing the data produced by the device, the IoT proposes a paradigm that simplifies infrastructure management and disaster recovery, hence improving the quality of life for humans.Fog Computing is a new computing paradigm that has emerged in recent years to meet the needs of latency-sensitive, geographically dispersed applications with high computational requirements. Fog computing is popular because it may be deployed near to the IoT nodes. Fog computing expands the computational, storage, and network capabilities of the cloud and serves as an intermediary layer between IoT devices and sensors. The nature of fog nodes makes resource management more difficult in fog. With fog computing, services and resources may be made available outside the cloud, close to the end devices. The inclusion of several heterogeneous devices, some of which may be mobile, makes ensuring adequate quality of service (QoS) in a fog system very difficult. Several quality-of-service considerations are accounted for, and QoS-aware techniques are provided in various portions of the fog system. So, in this article, we take a look at what's been done so far to ensure quality of service in fog computing. FogQSYM (Fog Queuing System) is an analytical model for Fog applications that helps to partition the application into many tiers and efficiently distribute resources based on factors such as memory, network speed, and processing power. When the infrastructure is built with lightweight computing devices, effectively allocating resources in the fog environment becomes a challenge. In a unified fog computing setting, we discuss how to assign tasks and locate virtual machines.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
17

Moon, Jiyoung, Minho Jeong, Sangmin Oh, Teemu H. Laine, and Jungryul Seo. "Data Collection Framework for Context-Aware Virtual Reality Application Development in Unity: Case of Avatar Embodiment." Sensors 22, no. 12 (June 19, 2022): 4623. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22124623.

Full text
Abstract:
Virtual Reality (VR) has been adopted as a leading technology for the metaverse, yet most previous VR systems provide one-size-fits-all experiences to users. Context-awareness in VR enables personalized experiences in the metaverse, such as improved embodiment and deeper integration of the real world and virtual worlds. Personalization requires context data from diverse sources. We proposed a reusable and extensible context data collection framework, ManySense VR, which unifies data collection from diverse sources for VR applications. ManySense VR was implemented in Unity based on extensible context data managers collecting data from data sources such as an eye tracker, electroencephalogram, pulse, respiration, galvanic skin response, facial tracker, and Open Weather Map. We used ManySense VR to build a context-aware embodiment VR scene where the user’s avatar is synchronized with their bodily actions. The performance evaluation of ManySense VR showed good performance in processor usage, frame rate, and memory footprint. Additionally, we conducted a qualitative formative evaluation by interviewing five developers (two males and three females; mean age: 22) after they used and extended ManySense VR. The participants expressed advantages (e.g., ease-of-use, learnability, familiarity, quickness, and extensibility), disadvantages (e.g., inconvenient/error-prone data query method and lack of diversity in callback methods), future application ideas, and improvement suggestions that indicate potential and can guide future development. In conclusion, ManySense VR is an efficient tool for researchers and developers to easily integrate context data into their Unity-based VR applications for the metaverse.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
18

Constantopoulos, Panos. "Leveraging Digital Cultural Memories." Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage 6 (September 30, 2016): 37–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.55630/dipp.2016.6.3.

Full text
Abstract:
The penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture and the emergence of digital cultural repositories and linked cultural data in particular are expected to enable new paths in humanities research and new approaches to cultural heritage. Success is contingent upon securing information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content. In this perspective, we review the use in the cultural heritage domain of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture, as well as in the Humanities at large. From collections management, to object documentation and domain modelling, to supporting the creative synthesis and re-interpretation of data, significant progress has been achieved in the development of relevant knowledge structures and software tools. As a consequence of this progress, digital repositories are being created that aim at serving as digital cultural memories, while a process of convergence among the different kinds of memory institutions, i.e., museums, archives, and libraries, in what concerns their information functions is already evolving. Yet the advantages offered by information management technology, mass storage, copying, and the ease of searching and quantitative analysis, are not enough to ensure the usefulness of those digital cultural memories unless information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content are ensured. Furthermore, the widely encountered need for integrating heterogeneous information becomes all the more pressing in the case of cultural heritage due to the specific traits of information in this domain. In view of the above fundamental requirements, in this presentation we briefly review the leveraging power of certain practices and approaches in realizing the potential of digital cultural memories. In particular, we review the use of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. Digital curation is an interdisciplinary field of enquiry and practice, which brings together disciplinary traditions and practices from computer science, information science, and disciplines practicing collections-based or data-intensive research, such as history of art, archaeology, biology, space and earth sciences, and application areas 38 such as e-science repositories, organizational records management, and memory institutions (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). Digital curation aims at ensuring adequate representation of and long-term access to digital information as its context of use changes, and at mitigating the risk of repositories becoming “data mortuaries”. To this end a lifecycle approach to the representation of curated information objects is adopted; event-centric representations are used to capture information “life events”; the class of agents involved is extended to include knowledge producers and communicators in addition to information custodians; and context-specificity is explicitly addressed. Cultural heritage information comprises representations of actual cultural objects (texts, artefacts, historical records, etc.), their histories, agents (persons and organizations) operating on such objects, and their relationships. It also includes interpretations of and opinions about such objects. The recording of this knowledge is characterized by disciplinary diversity, representational complexity and heterogeneity, historical orientation, and textual bias. These characteristics of information are in line with the character of humanities research: hermeneutic and intertextual, rather than experimental; narrative, rather than formal; idiographic rather than nomothetic; and, conformant to a realist rather than positivist account of episteme (Dallas 1999). The primary use of this information has been to support knowledge-based access, while now it is gradually also being targeted at various synthetic and creative uses. A rich semantic structure, including subsumption, meronymic, temporal, spatial, and various other semantic relations, is inherent to cultural information. Complexity is compounded by terminological inconsistency, subjectivity, multiplicity of interpretation and missing information. From an information lifecycle perspective, digital curation involves a number of distinct processes: appraisal; ingesting; classification, indexing and cataloguing; knowledge enhancement; presentation, publication and dissemination; user experience; repository management; and preservation. These processes rely on three supporting processes, namely, goal and usage modelling, domain modelling and authority management. These processes effectively capture the context of digital curation and produce valuable resources which can themselves be seen as curated digital assets (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008; Constantopoulos et al. 2009). The field of cultural information presents itself as a privileged domain for digital curation. There is a relatively long history of developing library systems and museum systems, along with recent intense activity on interoperable, semantically rich cultural information systems, boosted by two important developments: the emergence of the CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127) 1 standard ontology for cultural documentation; and the movement for convergence of museum, library and archive systems, one manifestation of which is the CIDOC CRM compatible FRBR-oo model 2 . Advances such as those outlined above allow addressing old research questions in new ways, as well as putting new questions that were very hard or impossible to tackle without the means of digital technologies. Significant enablers towards this direc- 1 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ 2 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbr_inro.html 39 tion are the so-called digital research infrastructures, which bear the promise of facilitating research through sharing tools and data. Several trends can be identified in the development of research infrastructures, which follow two main approaches: a) The normative approach, whereby normalized collections of data and tools are developed as common resources and managed centrally by the infrastructure. b) The regulative approach, whereby resources reside with individual organizations willing to contribute them, under specific terms, to the community. A set of interoperability conditions and mechanisms provide a regulatory function that lies at the heart of the infrastructure. Both approaches are being pursued in all disciplines, but the mix differs: in hard sciences building common normalized infrastructures appears to be a necessity, with a complementary, yet significant role to be played by a network of interoperable, disparate sources. In the humanities, on the other hand, long scholarly traditions have produced a formidable variety of information collections and formats, mostly offering interpreted, rather than raw material for publication and sharing. These conditions favour the development of regulated networks of interoperable sources, with centralized, normative infrastructures in a complementary capacity. By way of example, a recent such infrastructure is DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ 3 , one of the national constituents of DARIAH-EU 4 , the Europe-wide digital infrastructure in the arts and humanities. DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ is a hybrid -virtual distributed infrastructure, bringing together the strengths and capacities of leading research, academic, and collection custodian institutions through a carefully defined, lightweight layer of services, tools and activities complementing, rather than attempting to replicate, prior investments and capabilities. Arts and humanities data and content resources are as a rule thematically organized, widely distributed, under the custodianship and curation of diverse institutions, including government agencies and departments, public and private museums, archives and special libraries, as well as academic and research units, associations, research projects, and other actors, and displaying a diverse degree of digitization. The mission of the infrastructure is then to provide the research communities with effective, comprehensive and sustainable capability to discover, access, integrate, analyze, process, curate and disseminate arts and humanities data and information resources, through a concerted plan of virtual services and tools, and hybrid (combined virtual and physical) activities, integrating and running on top of existing primary information systems and leveraging integration and synergies with DARIAH- EU and other related infrastructures and aggregators (e.g. ARIADNE 5 , CARARE 6 , LoCloud 7 ). In its first stage of development, the DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ Research Infrastructure has offered the following groups of services: 3 http://www.dyas-net.gr/ 4 http://www.dariah.eu/ 5 http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/ 6 http://www.carare.eu/ 7 http://www.locloud.eu/ 40 • Data sharing : comprehensive registries of digital resources; • Supporting the development of digital resources : tools and best practice guidelines for the development of digital resources; • Capacity building: workshops and training activities; and • Digital Humanities Observatory : evidence-based research on digital humanities, monitoring, outreach and dissemination activities. Key factor in the development of DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ, ARIADNE, CARARE and LoCloud resources alike has been a curation-oriented aggregator, the Metadata and Object Repository - MORe 8 (Gavrilis, Angelis & Dallas 2013; Gavrilis et al. 2013). This system supports the aggregation of metadata from multiple sources (OAI-PMH, Archive, SIP, Omeka, MINT) and heterogeneous systems in a single repository, the creation of unified indexes of normalized and enriched metadata, the creation of RDF databases, and the publication of aggregated records to multiple recipients (OAI- PMH, Archive, Elastic Search, RDF Stores). It enables the dynamic definition of validation and enrichment plans, supported by a number of micro-services, as well as the measurement of metadata quality. MORe can incorporate any XML/RDF metadata schema and can support several intermediate schemas in parallel. Its architecture is based on micro-services, a software development model according to which a complex application is composed of small, independent services communicating via a language-agnostic API, thus being highly reusable. MORe currently maintains access to 30 SKOS-encoded thesauri, totaling several hundred thousands of terms, as well as to copies of the Geo-names and Perio.do services, thus offering information enrichment on the basis of a wide array of sources. Metadata enrichment is a process of automatic generation of metadata through the linking of metadata elements with data sources and/or vocabularies. The enrichment process increases the volume of metadata, but it also considerably enhances their precision, therefore their quality. Performing metadata aggregation and enrichment carries several benefits: increase of repository / site traffic, better retrieval precision, concentration of indexes in one system, better performance of user services. To date MORe is used by 110 content provider institutions, and accommodates 23 different metadata schemas and about 20,800,000 records. The advent of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities research calls for a deeper understanding of how humanists work with digital resources, tools and services as they engage with different aspects of research activity: from capturing, encoding, and publishing scholarly data to analyzing, visualizing, interpreting and communicating data and research argumentation to co-workers and readers. Digitally enabled scholarly work and the integration of digital content, tools and methods present not only commonalities but also differences across disciplines, methodological traditions, and communities of researchers. A significant challenge in providing integrated access to disparate digital humanities resources and, more broadly, in supporting digitally-enabled humanities research, lies in empirically capturing the context of use of digital content, methods and tools. 8 http://more.dcu.gr/ 41 Several attempts have been made to develop a conceptual framework for DH in practice. In 2008, the AHRC ICT Methods Network 9 developed a taxonomy of digital methods in the arts and humanities. This was the basis for the classification of over 200 digital humanities projects funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council in the online resource arts-humanities.net, as well as for the subsequent Digital Humanities at Oxford 10 taxonomy. Other initiatives to build a taxonomy of Digital Humanities include TADIRAH 11 and DH Commons 12 . From 2011 to 2015 the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities 13 (NeDiMAH) ran over 40 activities structured around key methodological areas in the humanities (digital representations of space and time; visualisation; linked data; creating and using large scale corpora; and creating editions). Through these activities, NeDiMAH gathered a snapshot of the practice of digital humanities in Europe, and the impact of digital methods on research. A key output of NeDiMAH is NeMO 14 : the NeDiMAH Ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities . This ontology of digital methods in the humanities has been built as a framework for understanding not just the use of digital methods, but also their relationship to digital content and tools. The development of an ontology, rather than a taxonomy, stands in recognition of the complexity of the digital humanities landscape, the interdisciplinarity of the field, and the dependencies that impact the use of digital methods in research. NeMO provides a conceptual framework capable of representing scholarly work in the humanities, addressing aspects of intentionality and capturing the diverse associations between research actors and their goals, activities undertaken, methods employed, resources and tools used, and outputs produced, with the aim of obtaining semantically rich structured representations of scholarly work (Angelis et al 2015; Hughes, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2016). It is grounded on earlier empirical research through semi-structured interviews with scholars from across Europe, which focused on analysing their research practices and capturing the resulting information requirements for research infrastructures (Benardou, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2013). The relevance of NeMO to the DH community was validated in a series of workshops through use cases contributed by researchers. A variety of complex associative queries articulated by researchers and encoded in SPARQL, demonstrated the potential of NeMO as an effective mechanism for information extraction and reasoning with regard to the use of digital resources in scholarly work and as a knowledge base schema for documenting scholarly practices. In a recent workshop in DH2016, researchers created their own NeMO-based descriptions of projects with an easy to use tool (Constantopoulos et al 2016). 9 http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/index.html 10 https://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/people-projects 11 http://tadirah.dariah.eu/vocab/index.php 12 http://dhcommons.org/ 13 http://nedimah.eu/ 14 http://nemo.dcu.gr/ 42 Knowledge bases documenting scholarly practice through NeMO can be useful to researchers by (a) helping them find information on earlier work relevant for their own research; (b) supporting goal-oriented organization of research work; (c) facilitating the discovery of new paths with regard to resources, tools and methods; and, (d) promoting networking among researchers with common interests. In addition research groups can get support for better project planning by explicitly exposing links between goals, actors, activities, methods, resources and tools, as well as assistance for discovering methodological trends, future directions and promising research ideas. Funding agencies, on the other hand, could benefit from the kind of systematic documentation and comparative overview of project work enabled by the ontology.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
19

Long, Xinjian, Xiangyang Gong, Bo Zhang, and Huiyang Zhou. "Deep Learning based Data Prefetching in CPU-GPU Unified Virtual Memory." Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, December 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2022.12.004.

Full text
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
20

Moldovan, Max, Chris Radbone, and Maria C. Inacio. "Benchmarking Computational Performance of Virtual Machines Within the Secure Unified Research Environment Versus Physical Computers." International Journal of Population Data Science 5, no. 5 (December 7, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.23889/ijpds.v5i5.1582.

Full text
Abstract:
IntroductionThe Secure Unified Research Environment (SURE) is a high-powered computing environment located within Sax Institute (Sydney, Australia). SURE was established through the financial support of the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) as part of the Population Health Research Network (PHRN). SURE is approved by the Australian Government as the only secure platform for analysing unit record level sensitive health and other Australian Government data, providing computational resources and secure infrastructure in a form of virtual machines (VMs) accessible by approved researchers in Australia and overseas. Objectives and ApproachWe aim to compare computational performance of SURE VMs of different configurations with the performance of physical computers by running a series of standardised computational tasks involving different numbers of central processingunit (CPU) cores available on each computer. The approach utilised the benchmark test maintained by the H2O.ai group (https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/). The results were measured over the datasets of different sizes, ranging from 500MB to 50GB in Random Access Memory (RAM). ResultsOur benchmarking outcomes have revealed that computational efficiency of physical computers uniformly outperform the efficiency of the current standard SURE VM configuration offerings, sometimes demonstrating a nearly double performance. For the range of typical analytical tasks assessed, computational performance greatly benefits from extending the number of computational cores available on a machine. Conclusion / ImplicationsSURE is a highly valuable tool enabling research and collaborations involving confidential population-based data. The shortage of RAM and CPU cores can be a major bottleneck even for moderately large datasets. VMs currently offered by SURE yet fall short of reaching computational performance of physical desktop computers. The results are to guide the funders and providers of secure remote access data laboratories responsible for providing Research Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) tailored to meet the needs of participating research groups.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
21

Berssenbrügge, Jan, and Erik Bonner. "GPU-Based Local Tone Mapping in the Context of Virtual Night Driving." Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering 13, no. 2 (April 22, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1115/1.4024117.

Full text
Abstract:
Virtual prototyping of automotive headlights requires a realistic illumination model, capable of rendering scenes of high contrast in fine detail. Due to the high dynamic range (HDR) nature of headlight beam-pattern data, which is projected onto the virtual road, high dynamic range illumination models are required. These are used as the basis for illumination in simulations for automotive headlight virtual prototyping. Since high dynamic range illumination models operate on brightness ranges commensurate with the real world, a postprocessing operation, known as tone mapping, is required to map each frame into the device-specific range of the display hardware. Algorithms for tone mapping, called tone-mapping operators, can be classified as global or local. Global operators are efficient to compute at the expense of scene quality. Local operators preserve scene detail, but, due to their additional computational complexity, are rarely used with interactive applications. Local tone-mapping methods produce more usable visualization results for engineering tasks. This paper proposes a local tone-mapping method suitable for use with interactive applications. To develop a suitable tone-mapping operator, a state of the art local tone-mapping method was accelerated using modern, work-efficient GPU (graphics processing unit) algorithms. Optimal performance, both in terms of memory and speed, was achieved by means of general-purpose GPU programming with CUDA (compute unified device architecture). A prototypic implementation has shown that the method works well with high dynamic range OpenGL applications. In the near future, the tone mapper will be integrated into the virtual night driving simulator at our institute.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
22

Alias, Norma, Nadia Nofri Yeni Suhari, Hafizah Farhah Saipan Saipol, Abdullah Aysh Dahawi, Masyitah Mohd Saidi, Hazidatul Akma Hamlan, and Che Rahim Che Teh. "PARALLEL COMPUTING OF NUMERICAL SCHEMES AND BIG DATA ANALYTIC FOR SOLVING REAL LIFE APPLICATIONS." Jurnal Teknologi 78, no. 8-2 (August 4, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.11113/jt.v78.9552.

Full text
Abstract:
This paper proposed the several real life applications for big data analytic using parallel computing software. Some parallel computing software under consideration are Parallel Virtual Machine, MATLAB Distributed Computing Server and Compute Unified Device Architecture to simulate the big data problems. The parallel computing is able to overcome the poor performance at the runtime, speedup and efficiency of programming in sequential computing. The mathematical models for the big data analytic are based on partial differential equations and obtained the large sparse matrices from discretization and development of the linear equation system. Iterative numerical schemes are used to solve the problems. Thus, the process of computational problems are summarized in parallel algorithm. Therefore, the parallel algorithm development is based on domain decomposition of problems and the architecture of difference parallel computing software. The parallel performance evaluations for distributed and shared memory architecture are investigated in terms of speedup, efficiency, effectiveness and temporal performance.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
23

BERTHOLD, JOST, HANS-WOLFGANG LOIDL, and KEVIN HAMMOND. "PAEAN: Portable and scalable runtime support for parallel Haskell dialects." Journal of Functional Programming 26 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0956796816000010.

Full text
Abstract:
AbstractOver time, several competing approaches to parallel Haskell programming have emerged. Different approaches support parallelism at various different scales, ranging from small multicores to massively parallel high-performance computing systems. They also provide varying degrees of control, ranging from completely implicit approaches to ones providing full programmer control. Most current designs assume a shared memory model at the programmer, implementation and hardware levels. This is, however, becoming increasingly divorced from the reality at the hardware level. It also imposes significant unwanted runtime overheads in the form of garbage collection synchronisation etc. What is needed is an easy way to abstract over the implementation and hardware levels, while presenting a simple parallelism model to the programmer. The PArallEl shAred Nothing runtime system design aims to provide a portable and high-level shared-nothing implementation platform for parallel Haskell dialects. It abstracts over major issues such as work distribution and data serialisation, consolidating existing, successful designs into a single framework. It also provides an optional virtual shared-memory programming abstraction for (possibly) shared-nothing parallel machines, such as modern multicore/manycore architectures or cluster/cloud computing systems. It builds on, unifies and extends, existing well-developed support for shared-memory parallelism that is provided by the widely used GHC Haskell compiler. This paper summarises the state-of-the-art in shared-nothing parallel Haskell implementations, introduces the PArallEl shAred Nothing abstractions, shows how they can be used to implement three distinct parallel Haskell dialects, and demonstrates that good scalability can be obtained on recent parallel machines.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
24

Van der Nagel, Emily. "Alts and Automediality: Compartmentalising the Self through Multiple Social Media Profiles." M/C Journal 21, no. 2 (April 25, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1379.

Full text
Abstract:
IntroductionAlt, or alternative, accounts are secondary profiles people use in addition to a main account on a social media platform. They are a kind of automediation, a way of representing the self, that deliberately displays a different identity facet, and addresses a different audience, to what someone considers to be their main account. The term “alt” seems to have originated from videogame culture and been incorporated into understandings of social media accounts. A wiki page about alternate accounts on virtual world Second Life calls an alt “an account used by a resident for something other than their usual activity or to do things in privacy” (n.p.).Studying alts gives an insight into practices of managing and contextualising identities on networked platforms that are visible, persistent, editable, associable (Treem and Leonardi), spreadable, searchable (boyd), shareable (Papacharissi "Without"), and personalised (Schmidt). When these features of social media are understood as limitations that lead to context collapse (Marwick and boyd 122; Wesch 23), performative incoherence (Papacharissi Affective 99), and the risk of overexposure, people respond by developing alternative ways to use platforms.Plenty of scholarship on social media identities claims the self is fragmented, multifaceted, and contextual (Marwick 355; Schmidt 369). But the scholarship on multiple account use on single platforms is still emerging. Joanne Orlando writes for The Conversation that teens increasingly have more than one account on Instagram: “finstas” are “fake” or secondary accounts used to post especially candid photos to a smaller audience, thus they are deployed strategically to avoid the social pressure of looking polished and attractive. These accounts are referred to as “fake” because they are often pseudonymous, but the practice of compartmentalising audiences makes the promise that the photos posted are more authentic, spontaneous, and intimate. Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire (162) argue that while secondary accounts promise a less constructed version of life, speaking back to the dominant genre of aesthetically pleasing Instagram photos, all social media posts are constructed within the context of platform norms and imagined audiences (Litt & Hargittai 1). Still, secondary accounts are important for revealing these norms (Cardell, Douglas & Maguire 163). The secondary account is particularly prevalent on Twitter, a platform that often brings together multiple audiences into a public profile. In 2015, author Emily Reynolds claimed that Twitter alts were “an appealingly safe space compared to main Twitter where abuse, arguments and insincerity are rife” (n.p.).This paper draws on a survey of Twitter users with alts to argue that the strategic use of pseudonyms, profile photos without faces, locked accounts, and smaller audiences are ways to overcome some of the built-in limitations of social media automediality.Identity Is Multiple Chris Poole, founder of anonymous bulletin board 4chan, believes identity is a fluid concept, and designed his platform as a space in which people could connect over interests, not profiles. Positioning 4chan against real-name platforms, he argues:Your identity is prismatic […] we’re all multifaceted people. Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, that there is one reflection that you have, there is one idea of self. But in fact we’re more like diamonds. You can look at people from any angle and see something totally different, but they’re still the same. (n.p.)Claiming that identities are contextual performances stems from longstanding sociological and philosophical work on identity from theorists like Erving Goffman, who in the 1950s proposed a dramaturgical framework of the self to consider interactions as fundamentally social and performative rather than reflecting one core, essential inner self.Social media profiles allow people to use the language of the platform to represent themselves (Marwick 362), meaning identity performances are framed by platform architecture and features, formal and informal rules, and social ties (Schmidt 369). Social media profiles shape how people can engage in how they represent themselves, argue Shelly Farnham and Elizabeth Churchill, who claim that the assumption that a single, unified online identity is sufficient is a problematic trend in platform design. They argue that when facets of their lives are incompatible, people segment those lives into separate areas in order to maintain social norms and boundaries.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson consider identity multiplicities to be crucial to automediality, which is built on an aesthetic of bricolage and pastiche rather than understanding subjectivity to be the essence of the self. In her work on automediality and online girlhood, Maguire ("Home"; "Self-Branding" 74) argues that an automedial approach attends to how mediation shapes the way selves can be represented online, claiming that the self is brought into being through these mediation practices.This article understands alt accounts as a type of social media practice that Nick Couldry (52) identifies as presencing: sustaining a public presence with media. I investigate presencing through studying alts as a way to manage separate publics, and the tension between public and private, on Twitter by surveying users who have a main and an alt account. Although research into multiple account use is nascent, Alice Marwick lists maintaining multiple accounts as a tactic to mitigate context collapse, alongside other strategies such as using nicknames, only sharing posts when they are appropriate for multiple audiences, and keeping more personal interactions to private messenger and text message.Ben Light argues that while connection is privileged on social media, disconnective practices like editing out, deleting, unfriending, untagging, rejecting follower requests, and in this case, creating alt accounts, are crucial. Disconnecting from some aspects of the social media experience allows people to stay connected on a particular platform, by negotiating the dynamics that do not appeal to them. While the disconnective practice of presencing through an alt has not been studied in detail, research I discuss in the next section focuses on multi-account use to argue that people who have more than one account on a single platform are aware of their audiences, and want control over which people see which posts.Multi-Platform and Multi-Account UseA conference presentation by Frederic Stutzman and Woodrow Hartzog calls maintaining multiple profiles on a single platform a strategy for boundary regulation, through which access is selectively granted to specific people. Stutzman and Hartzog interviewed 20 people with multiple profiles to determine four main motives for this kind of boundary regulation: privacy, identity management, utility (using one profile for a distinct purpose, like managing a restaurant page), and propriety (conforming to social norms around appropriate disclosure).Writing about multiple profiles on Reddit, Alex Leavitt argues that temporary or “throwaway” accounts give people the chance to disclose sensitive or off-topic information. For example, some women use throwaways when posting to a bra sizing subreddit, so men don’t exploit their main account for sexual purposes. Throwaways are a boundary management technique Leavitt considers beneficial for Redditors, and urges platform designers to consider implementing alternatives to single accounts.Jessa Lingel and Adam Golub also call for platforms to allow for multiple accounts, suggesting Facebook should let users link their profiles at a metadata level and be able to switch between them. They argue that this would be especially beneficial for those who take on specific personas, such as drag queens. In their study of drag queens with more than one Facebook profile, Lingel and Golub suggest that drag queens need to maintain boundaries between fans and friends, but creating a separate business page for their identity as a performer was inadequate for the kind of nuanced personal communication they engaged in with their fans. Drag queens considered this kind of communication relationship maintenance, not self-branding. This demonstrates that drag queens on Facebook are attentive to their audience, which is a common feature of users posting to social media: they have an idea, no matter how accurate, of who they are posting to.Eden Litt and Eszter Hargittai (1) call this perception the imagined audience, which serves as a guide for how to present the self and what to post about when an audience is unknown or not physically present. People in their study would either claim they were posting to no-one in particular, or that they had an audience in mind, whether this was personal ties (close friends, family, specific individuals like a best friend), communal ties (people interested in cleaning tips, local art community, people in Portland), professional ties (colleagues, clients, my radio show audience), and phantasmal ties (people with whom someone has an imaginary relationship, like famous people, brands, animals, and the dead).Based on these studies of boundary regulation, throwaway accounts, separate Facebook pages for fans and friends, and imagined audiences on social media, I designed a short survey that would prompt respondents to reflect on their own practices of negotiating platform limitations through their alt account.Asking Twitter about AltsTo research alts, I asked my own Twitter followers to tell me about theirs. I’ve been tweeting from @emvdn since 2010, and I have roughly 5,500 followers, mostly Melbourne academics, writers, and professionals. This method of asking my own Twitter followers questions builds on a study by Alice Marwick and danah boyd, in which they investigated context collapse on social media by tweeting questions like “who do you tweet to?” and monitoring the replies.I sent out a tweet with a link to the survey on 31 January 2018, and left it open for responses until I submitted this draft article on 18 February 2018:I’m writing about alt (alternative/secondary) accounts on social media. If you have an alt account, on Twitter or elsewhere, could you tell me about it, in survey form? (van der Nagel)The tweet was retweeted 161 times, spreading the survey to other accounts and contexts, and I received a total of 326 responses to the survey. For a full list of survey questions, see Appendix. I asked people to choose one alt (if they had more than one), and answer questions about it, including what prompted them to start the account, how they named it, who the audience is for their main and their alt, and how similar they perceived their main and alt to be. I also asked whether they would like to remain anonymous or be quoted under a pseudonym, which I have followed in this article.Of course, by posting the Twitter survey to my own followers, I am necessarily asking a specific group of people whose alt practices might not be indicative of broader trends. Just like any research done on Twitter, this research attracted a particular group: the results of this survey give a snapshot of the followers of a 29 year old female Melbourne academic, and the wider networks it was retweeted into.Although I asked anyone with more than one account on the same platform to fill out the survey, I’ll be focusing on pseudonymous alts here. Not everyone is pseudonymous on their alt: 61 per cent of respondents said they use a pseudonym, and half (51 per cent) said theirs was locked, or unavailable to the public. Some people have an alt in order to distinguish themselves from their professional account, some are connecting with those who share a specific interest, and others deliberately created an alt to harass and troll others on Twitter. But I regard pseudonymous alts as especially important to this article, as they evidence particular understandings of social media.Asking how people named their alt gave me an insight into how they framed it: as another facet of their identity: “I chose something close, but not too close to my main twitter handle,” or directed towards one particular subject they use the alt for: “I wanted a personal account which would be about all sorts, and one just for women’s sport” (Danielle Warby). Some changed the name of their account often, to further hide the account away: “I have renamed it several times, usually referencing in jokes with friends.”Many alt usernames express that the account is an alternative to a main one: people often said their alt username was their main username with a prefix or suffix like “alt,” “locked,” “NSFW” (Not Safe For Work, adult content), “priv” (short for “private”), or “2”, so if their main account was @emvdn, their alt account might be @emvdn_alt. Some used a username or nickname from another part of their life, used a pop culture reference, or wanted a completely random username, so they used a username generator or simply mashed the keyboard to get a string of random characters. Others used their real name for their alt account: “It’s my name. The point wasn’t to hide, it was to separate/segment conversiations [sic]” (knitmeapony).When asked who their audience was for their main and their alt, most people spoke of a smaller, more intimate audience of close friends or trusted accounts. On Twitter, people with locked accounts must approve followers before they can see their tweets, so it’s likely they are thinking of a specific group. One person said their alt was “locked behind a trust-wall (like a paywall, but you need to pay with a life-long friendship).” A few people said their audience for their alt was just one person: themselves. While their main account was for friends, or just “anyone who wants to follow me” (Brisbane blogger), their alt would simply be for them alone, to privately post and reflect.Asking how similar the main and alt account was led people reflecting on how they used multiple accounts to manage their multifaceted identity. “My alt account is just me unfiltered,” said one anonymous respondent, and another called their accounts “two sides of the same coin. Both me, just public and private versions.” One respondent said, “I would communicate differently in the boardroom from the bedroom. And I guess my alt is more like a private bedroom party, so it doesn’t matter if my bra comes off.”Many people signalled their awareness or experience of harassment when asked about benefits or drawbacks of alt accounts: people started theirs to avoid being harassed, bullied, piled-on, or judged. While an alt account gave people a private, safe channel in which to reach close friends and share intimate parts of their life, they also spoke about difficulties with maintaining more than one account, and potential awkwardness if someone requested to follow them that they did not want to connect with.It seemed that asking about benefits and drawbacks of alts led to articulations of labour—keeping accounts separate, and deciding on who to allow into this private space—but fears about social media more generally also surfaced. Although creating an alt meant people were consciously taking steps to compartmentalise their identity, this did not make them feel completely impervious to harassment, context collapse, and overexposure. “Some dingus will screencap and create drama,” was one potential drawback of having an alt: just because confessions and intimate or sexual photos were shared privately doesn’t mean they will stay private. People were keen to acknowledge that alts involved ongoing labour and platform negotiations.Multiple Identity Facets; Multiple AccountsWhen I released the survey, I was expecting most people to discuss their alt, locked, private account, which existed in contrast to their main, unlocked, professional one. Some people did just that, like Sarah:I worked in the media and needed a place to put my thoughts ABOUT my job/the media that I didn’t want my boss reading – not necessarily negative, just private thoughts I wanted to write somewhere.Wanting to maintain a public presence while still having an intimate space for personal self-disclosure was a common theme, which showed an awareness of imagined audiences, and a desire to disconnect from certain audiences, particularly colleagues and family members. Some didn’t necessarily want an intimate alt, but a targeted one: there were accounts for dog photos, weight loss journeys, fandoms, pregnancies, fetishes, a positive academic advice account using a Barbie doll called @barbie_phd, and one for cataloguing laundromats around London. It also seemed alts were contagious: people regularly admitted they began theirs because a friend had one. “Friends were using alts and it looked like a cool world;” “my friends seemed to be having a good time with it, and I wanted to try something they were interested in;” “wanted to be part of the ‘little twitter’ community.”Fluidities I wasn’t expecting also emerged. One respondent considered both of their accounts to be primary:it’s not clear for me which of my accounts is the “alt”. i had my non-professional one first, but i don’t consider either of them secondary, though the professional one is much more active.Along with those that changed the name of their alt often, L said they “initially kept private to only me to rant, record very private thoughts etc., have since extended it to 3 followers.” Platforms encourage continuous, active, engaged participation with ever-expanding networks of followers and friends. As José van Dijck (12) argues, platforms privilege connections, even as they stress human connectedness and downplay the automated connectivity from which they profit. Twitter’s homepage urges people to “follow your interests. Hear what people are talking about. Join the conversation. See what’s happening in the world right now,” and encourages people to keep adding more connections by featuring a recommendation panel that displays suggestions next to the main feed for “who to follow”, and links to import contacts from Gmail and other address books. In this instance, L’s three followers is an act of resistance, a disconnective practice that only links L with the very specific people they want to be an audience for their private thoughts, not to the extended networks of people L knows.ConclusionThis article has provided further evidence that on social media platforms, people don’t just have one account with their real name that faithfully expresses their one true identity. Even among those with alts, practices vary immensely, with some people using their alt as a quieter, more private space, and others creating a public identity and stream of posts catering to a niche audience.When users understand social media’s visibility, persistence, editability, association, spreadability, searchability, shareability, and personalisation as limitations, they seek ways to compartmentalise their identity facets so they can have access to the conversations, contexts, and audiences they want.There is scope for future research in this area on how alts are created, perceived, and managed, and how they relate to the broader social media landscape and its emphasis on real names, expanding networks, and increasingly sophisticated connections between people, platforms, and data. A larger study encompassing multiple platforms and accounts would reveal wider patterns of use and give more insight into this common, yet understudied, disconnective practice of selective presencing.Referencesboyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.Cardell, Kylie, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire. “‘Stories’: Social Media and Ephemeral Narratives as Memoir.” Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir. Eds. Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph. New York: Routledge, 2018. 157–172.Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge: Polity P, 2012.Farnham, Shelly D., and Elizabeth F. Churchill. “Faceted Identity, Faceted Lives: Social and Technical Issues with Being Yourself Online.” CSCW ’11: Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Hangzhou, China, 19–23 March 2011. 359–68.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1956].Leavitt, Alex. “‘This Is a Throwaway Account’: Temporary Technical Identities and Perceptions of Anonymity in a Massive Online Community.” Presented at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference, Vancouver, Canada, 14–18 March 2015.Light, Ben. Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.Lingel, Jessa, and Adam Golub. “In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn’s Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20.5 (2015): 536–553.Litt, Eden, and Eszter Hargittai. “The Imagined Audience on Social Network Sites.” Social Media + Society 2.1 (2016).Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website.” M/C Journal 17.3 (2014). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/821>.———. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” Biography 38.1 (2015): 72–86.Marwick, Alice. “Online Identity.” A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 355–64.———, and danah boyd. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13.1 (2011): 114–133.Orlando, Joanne. “How Teens Use Fake Instagram Accounts to Relieve the Pressure of Perfection.” The Conversation, 7 Mar. 2018. <http://theconversation.com/how-teens-use-fake-instagram-accounts-to-relieve-the-pressure-of-perfection-92105>.Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736.001.0001.———. “Without You, I’m Nothing: Performances of the Self on Twitter.” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 1989–2006.Poole, Chris. “Prismatic Identity.” Chris Hates Writing 9 Oct. 2013 <http://chrishateswriting.com/post/63564095133/prismatic-identity>.Reynolds, Emily. “Alt Twitter: Where Brutal Honesty Hides behind Pseudonyms.” Gadgette 10 Aug. 2015 <https://www.gadgette.com/2015/08/10/welcome-to-alt-twitter-where-brutal-honesty-hides-behind-pseudonyms/>.Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik. “Practices of Networked Identity.” A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 365–74.Second Life Wiki. “Alternate Account.” Second Life Wiki (2018). <http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Alternate_Account>.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Stutzman, Frederic D., and Woodrow Hartzog. “Boundary Regulation in Social Media.” CSCW ’12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11–15 February, Seattle, USA (2012).Treem, Jeffrey W., and Paul M. Leonardi. “Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association.” Communication Yearbook 36 (2012): 143–89. Van der Nagel, Emily. “Writing about Alt Accounts.” Twitter 31 Jan. 2018, 4.42 p.m. <https://twitter.com/emvdn/status/958576094713696262>.Van Dijck, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.Wesch, Michael. “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam.” Explorations in Media Ecology 8.2 (2009): 19–34. Appendix: List of Survey QuestionsDemographic informationAll the questions in this survey are optional, so feel free to skip any if you’re not comfortable sharing.How old are you?What is your gender identity?What is your main occupation?What is your city and country of residence?Which social media platforms do you use? Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Tencent QQ, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Renren, other?Which social media platforms do you have an alt account on? Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Tencent QQ, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Renren, other?Your alt accountThis section asks you to pick one of your alt accounts - for example, your locked account on Twitter separate from your main account, a throwaway on Reddit, or a close-friends-only Facebook account - and tell me about it.Which platform is your alt account on?Is your alt locked (unavailable to the public)? Yes/NoWhat prompted you to start your alt account?Do you use a pseudonym on your alt? Yes/NoDo you use a photo of yourself as the profile image? Yes/NoDo you share photos of yourself on your alt? Yes/NoCan you tell me about how you named your alt?Which account do you use more often? My main/my alt/I use them about the sameWhich has a bigger audience? My main/my alt/They’re about the sameWho is the audience for your main account? Who is the audience for your alt account? What topics would you post about on your alt that you’d never post about on your main? How similar do you think your main and alt accounts are? What are the benefits of having an alt?What are the drawbacks of having an alt? Thank you!If I quote you in my research project, what name/pseudonym would you like me to use? My name/pseudonym is___________ OR I would like to remain anonymous and be assigned a participant number
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
25

Kellner, Douglas. "Engaging Media Spectacle." M/C Journal 6, no. 3 (June 1, 2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2202.

Full text
Abstract:
In the contemporary era, media spectacle organizes and mobilizes economic life, political conflict, social interactions, culture, and everyday life. My recently published book Media Spectacle explores a profusion of developments in hi-tech culture, media-driven society, and spectacle politics. Spectacle culture involves everything from film and broadcasting to Internet cyberculture and encompasses phenomena ranging from elections to terrorism and to the media dramas of the moment. For ‘Logo’, I am accordingly sketching out briefly a terrain I probe in detail in the book from which these examples are taken.1 During the past decades, every form of culture and significant forms of social life have become permeated by the logic of the spectacle. Movies are bigger and more spectacular than ever, with high-tech special effects expanding the range of cinematic spectacle. Television channels proliferate endlessly with all-day movies, news, sports, specialty niches, re-runs of the history of television, and whatever else can gain an audience. The rock spectacle reverberates through radio, television, CDs, computers networks, and extravagant concerts. The Internet encircles the world in the spectacle of an interactive and multimedia cyberculture. Media culture excels in creating megaspectacles of sports championships, political conflicts, entertainment, "breaking news" and media events, such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Death of Princess Diana, or the sex or murder scandal of the moment. Megaspectacle comes as well to dominate party politics, as the political battles of the day, such as the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment, the 36 Day Battle for the White House after Election 2000, and the September 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War. These dramatic media passion plays define the politics of the time, and attract mass audiences to their programming, hour after hour, day after day. The concept of "spectacle" derives from French Situationist theorist Guy Debord's 1972 book Society of the Spectacle. "Spectacle," in Debord's terms, "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (Debord 1970: #10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles. Spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, and dreams and nightmares, putting on display dominant hopes and fears. They serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its conflicts and modes of conflict resolution. They include sports events, political campaigns and elections, and media extravaganzas like sensational murder trials, or the Bill Clinton sex scandals and impeachment spectacle (1998-1999). As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming ever more technologically dazzling and are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life. Under the influence of a postmodern image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, a semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and drama, which deeply influence thought and action. For Debord: "When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society" (#18). Today, however, I would maintain it is the multimedia spectacle of sight, sound, touch, and, coming to you soon, smell that constitutes the multidimensional sense experience of the new interactive spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life -- recovering the full range of their human powers through creative praxis. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in passively consuming spectacles, one is separated from actively producing one's life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals passively observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The situationist project by contrast involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice. Since Debord's theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an "entertainment economy," business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.2 Via the "entertainmentization" of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).3 In a competitive business world, the "fun factor" can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers' attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining out are coded as an "experience," as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and "links to other cool sites." To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace. Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s. Entertainment has always been a prime field of the spectacle, but in today's infotainment society, entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the economy, politics, society, and everyday life in important new ways. Building on the tradition of spectacle, contemporary forms of entertainment from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, drama, and other domains of culture, as well as producing spectacular new forms of culture such as cyberspace, multimedia, and virtual reality. For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like film, or television, in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). On Gabler’s view, we star in our own "lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms, entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has metastasized into life" to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish between the two (1998: 9). As Gabler sees it, Ralph Lauren is our fashion expert; Martha Stewart designs our sets; Jane Fonda models our shaping of our bodies; and Oprah Winfrey advises us on our personal problems.4 Media spectacle is indeed a culture of celebrity who provide dominant role models and icons of fashion, look, and personality. In the world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major social domain from entertainment to politics to sports to business. An ever-expanding public relations industry hypes certain figures, elevating them to celebrity status, and protects their positive image in the never-ending image wars and dangers that a celebrity will fall prey to the machinations of negative-image and thus lose celebrity status, and/or become figures of scandal and approbation, as will some of the players and institutions that I examine in Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003). Sports has long been a domain of the spectacle with events like the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowl, World Soccer Cup, and NBA championships attracting massive audiences, while generating sky-high advertising rates. These cultural rituals celebrate society's deepest values (i.e. competition, winning, success, and money), and corporations are willing to pay top dollar to get their products associated with such events. Indeed, it appears that the logic of the commodity spectacle is inexorably permeating professional sports which can no longer be played without the accompaniment of cheerleaders, giant mascots who clown with players and spectators, and raffles, promotions, and contests that feature the products of various sponsors. Sports stadiums themselves contain electronic reproduction of the action, as well as giant advertisements for various products that rotate for maximum saturation -- previewing environmental advertising in which entire urban sites are becoming scenes to boost consumption spectacles. Arenas, like the United Center in Chicago, America West Arena in Phoenix, on Enron Field in Houston are named after corporate sponsors. Of course, after major corporate scandals or collapse, like the Enron spectacle, the ballparks must be renamed! The Texas Ranger Ballpark in Arlington, Texas supplements its sports arena with a shopping mall, office buildings, and a restaurant in which for a hefty price one can watch the athletic events while eating and drinking.5 The architecture of the Texas Rangers stadium is an example of the implosion of sports and entertainment and postmodern spectacle. A man-made lake surrounds the stadium, the corridor inside is modeled after Chartes Cathedral, and the structure is made of local stone that provides the look of the Texas Capitol in Austin. Inside there are Texas longhorn cattle carvings, panels of Texas and baseball history, and other iconic signifiers of sports and Texas. The merging of sports, entertainment, and local spectacle is now typical in sports palaces. Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, Florida, for instance, "has a three-level mall that includes places where 'fans can get a trim at the barber shop, do their banking and then grab a cold one at the Budweiser brew pub, whose copper kettles rise three stories. There is even a climbing wall for kids and showroom space for car dealerships'" (Ritzer 1998: 229). Film has long been a fertile field of the spectacle, with "Hollywood" connoting a world of glamour, publicity, fashion, and excess. Hollywood film has exhibited grand movie palaces, spectacular openings with searchlights and camera-popping paparazzi, glamorous Oscars, and stylish hi-tech film. While epic spectacle became a dominant genre of Hollywood film from early versions of The Ten Commandments through Cleopatra and 2001 in the 1960s, contemporary film has incorporated the mechanics of spectacle into its form, style, and special effects. Films are hyped into spectacle through advertising and trailers which are ever louder, more glitzy, and razzle-dazzle. Some of the most popular films of the late 1990s were spectacle films, including Titanic, Star Wars -- Phantom Menace, Three Kings, and Austin Powers, a spoof of spectacle, which became one of the most successful films of summer 1999. During Fall 1999, there was a cycle of spectacles, including Topsy Turvy, Titus, Cradle Will Rock, Sleepy Hollow, The Insider, and Magnolia, with the latter featuring the biblical spectacle of the raining of frogs in the San Fernando Valley, in an allegory of the decadence of the entertainment industry and deserved punishment for its excesses. The 2000 Academy Awards were dominated by the spectacle Gladiator, a mediocre film that captured best picture award and best acting award for Russell Crowe, thus demonstrating the extent to which the logic of the spectacle now dominates Hollywood film. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films of 2001 are also hi-tech spectacle, such as Moulin Rouge, a film spectacle that itself is a delirious ode to spectacle, from cabaret and the brothel to can-can dancing, opera, musical comedy, dance, theater, popular music, and film. A postmodern pastiche of popular music styles and hits, the film used songs and music ranging from Madonna and the Beatles to Dolly Parton and Kiss. Other 2001 film spectacles include Pearl Harbor, which re-enacts the Japanese attack on the U.S. that propelled the country to enter World War II, and that provided a ready metaphor for the September 11 terror attacks. Major 2001 film spectacles range from David Lynch’s postmodern surrealism in Mulholland Drive to Steven Spielberg’s blending of his typically sentimental spectacle of the family with the formalist rigor of Stanley Kubrick in A.I. And the popular 2001 military film Black-Hawk Down provided a spectacle of American military heroism which some critics believed sugar-coated the actual problems with the U.S. military intervention in Somalia, causing worries that a future U.S. adventure by the Bush administration and Pentagon would meet similar problems. There were reports, however, that in Somalian cinemas there were loud cheers as the Somalians in the film shot down the U.S. helicopter, and pursued and killed American soldiers, attesting to growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world against Bush administration policies. Television has been from its introduction in the 1940s a promoter of consumption spectacle, selling cars, fashion, home appliances, and other commodities along with consumer life-styles and values. It is also the home of sports spectacle like the Super Bowl or World Series, political spectacles like elections (or more recently, scandals), entertainment spectacle like the Oscars or Grammies, and its own spectacles like breaking news or special events. Following the logic of spectacle entertainment, contemporary television exhibits more hi-tech glitter, faster and glitzier editing, computer simulations, and with cable and satellite television, a fantastic array of every conceivable type of show and genre. TV is today a medium of spectacular programs like The X-Files or Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and spectacles of everyday life such as MTV's The Real World and Road Rules, or the globally popular Survivor and Big Brother series. Real life events, however, took over TV spectacle in 2000-2001 in, first, an intense battle for the White House in a dead-heat election, that arguably constitutes one of the greatest political crimes and scandals in U.S. history (see Kellner 2001). After months of the Bush administration pushing the most hardright political agenda in memory and then deadlocking as the Democrats took control of the Senate in a dramatic party re-affiliation of Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, the world was treated to the most horrifying spectacle of the new millennium, the September 11 terror attacks and unfolding Terror War that has so far engulfed Afghanistan and Iraq. These events promise an unending series of deadly spectacle for the foreseeable future.6 Hence, we are emerging into a new culture of media spectacle that constitutes a novel configuration of economy, society, politics, and everyday life. It involves new cultural forms, social relations, and modes of experience. It is producing an ever-proliferating and expanding spectacle culture with its proliferating media forms, cultural spaces, and myriad forms of spectacle. It is evident in the U.S. as the new millennium unfolds and may well constitute emergent new forms of global culture. Critical social theory thus faces important challenges in theoretically mapping and analyzing these emergent forms of culture and society and the ways that they may contain novel forms of domination and oppression, as well as potential for democratization and social justice. Works Cited Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1967. Gabler, Neil. Life the Movie. How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Kellner, Douglas. Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Kellner, Douglas. From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Kellner, Douglas. Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. Thousand Oaks, Cal. and London: Sage, 1998. Wolf, Michael J. Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces are Transforming Our Lives. New York: Times Books, 1999. Notes 1 See Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 2 Wolf's book is a detailed and useful celebration of the "entertainment economy," although he is a shill for the firms and tycoons that he works for and celebrates them in his book. Moreover, while entertainment is certainly an important component of the infotainment economy, it is an exaggeration to say that it drives it and is actually propelling it, as Wolf repeatedly claims. Wolf also downplays the negative aspects of the entertainment economy, such as growing consumer debt and the ups and downs of the infotainment stock market and vicissitudes of the global economy. 3 Another source notes that "the average American household spent $1,813 in 1997 on entertainment -- books, TV, movies, theater, toys -- almost as much as the $1,841 spent on health care per family, according to a survey by the US Labor Department." Moreover, "the price we pay to amuse ourselves has, in some cases, risen at a rate triple that of inflation over the past five years" (USA Today, April 2, 1999: E1). The NPD Group provided a survey that indicated that the amount of time spent on entertainment outside of the home –- such as going to the movies or a sport event – was up 8% from the early to the late 1990s and the amount of time in home entertainment, such as watching television or surfing the Internet, went up 2%. Reports indicate that in a typical American household, people with broadband Internet connections spend 22% more time on all-electronic media and entertainment than the average household without broadband. See “Study: Broadband in homes changes media habits” (PCWORLD.COM, October 11, 2000). 4 Gabler’s book is a synthesis of Daniel Boorstin, Dwight Macdonald, Neil Poster, Marshall McLuhan, and other trendy theorists of media culture, but without the brilliance of a Baudrillard, the incisive criticism of an Adorno, or the understanding of the deeper utopian attraction of media culture of a Bloch or Jameson. Likewise, Gabler does not, a la cultural studies, engage the politics of representation, or its economics and political economy. He thus ignores mergers in the culture industries, new technologies, the restructuring of capitalism, globalization, and shifts in the economy that are driving the impetus toward entertainment. Gabler does get discuss how new technologies are creating new spheres of entertainment and forms of experience and in general describes rather than theorizes the trends he is engaging. 5 The project was designed and sold to the public in part through the efforts of the son of a former President, George W. Bush. Young Bush was bailed out of heavy losses in the Texas oil industry in the 1980s by his father's friends and used his capital gains, gleaned from what some say as illicit insider trading, to purchase part-ownership of a baseball team to keep the wayward son out of trouble and to give him something to do. The soon-to-be Texas governor, and future President of the United States, sold the new stadium to local taxpayers, getting them to agree to a higher sales tax to build the stadium which would then become the property of Bush and his partners. This deal allowed Bush to generate a healthy profit when he sold his interest in the Texas Rangers franchise and to buy his Texas ranch, paid for by Texas tax-payers (for sources on the scandalous life of George W. Bush and his surprising success in politics, see Kellner 2001 and the further discussion of Bush Jr. in Chapter 6). 6 See Douglas Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kellner, Douglas. "Engaging Media Spectacle " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>. APA Style Kellner, D. (2003, Jun 19). Engaging Media Spectacle . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
We offer discounts on all premium plans for authors whose works are included in thematic literature selections. Contact us to get a unique promo code!

To the bibliography