beyond mass media and narcissism a media by and for the masses

Mass media aimed at the masses produces  the narcissism of the new  I, Me  generation. But beyond that  lies a new  technology enabled media of the masses, for the masses    - where "Each receiver is a potential transmitter".A message multiplier with a message that matters beyond the self projection of  I and Me. .  

Documenting your entire existence might turn out to be useful for future historians, but it's a somewhat unnerving hobby. The processes started by Myspace, then Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and YouPorn, ever more aided by technologies like the iPhone, perhaps reach their consummation in Memoto: a wearable camera, clipped to clothes or worn as jewellery, able to record practically every detail of the wearer's life, linked via the internet for instant public self-presentation.

Memoto is merely a reductio ad absurdum of something that has been continuing for some time: the extension of media production so that something that was once tightly controlled by conglomerates is now produced en masse by millions of people. As we concentrate on the worrying results of this, we forget that we are seeing the fulfilment of a dream that leftwing media theorists have had since the 1920s. They imagined that when media – text, photo, film, radio – was able to be produced by many rather than few, huge political changes could be possible.

In the Soviet Union at the same time, "two-way newspapers" in factories, claimed Brecht's friend Sergei Tretiakov, were doing just this. In both countries, the "worker photography" movement was bringing working conditions and ordinary lives to prominence, and were featured regularly in the mass-circulation German communist weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, due to its enthusiastic take-up by the Comintern's media mogul, Willi Münzenberg. Those who advocated the comprehensive documentation of everyday life did so because they wanted to comprehensively transform it.

 "Each receiver is a potential transmitter", wrote Enzensberger, and so it is. They would have relished, for instance, the way that the cameraphones of both demonstrators and passers-by recorded the killing of Ian Tomlinson, instantly disproving the police's hasty, centralised statements; although their use by all sides during the August 2011 riots showed that this footage could be just as easily used by the courts.

Much of the left, especially its anarchistic and autonomist fringes, has long been comfortable with new media. It was the original Autonomia in 1970s Bologna that appropriated the new apparatus, in the form of the pirate station Radio Alice. What is missing, perhaps, is organisation that could focus these media into something strong enough to shout down the internet's ever-present narcissistic babble; maybe "autonomy needs its Willi Münzenberg", as the critic Steve Edwards has claimed. Inanity still dominates the new media technologies. But what the left could be focusing on is what they make possible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/25/memoto-camera

The tiny device is designed to be clipped to clothes or worn on a necklace. As well as a five megapixel digital camera, it will feature a GPS chip to keep track of owners' locations and automatically log and organise pictures via a specially-created iPhone and Android apps. Memoto claims the battery will last two days.

"Many fantastic and special moments become blurred together after a while and it feels like life just rushes by, too fast for us to grasp," said the Swedish start-up behind the project.

"We at Memoto wanted to find a way to relive more of our lives in the future - and enjoy the present as it happens."

Memoto describes the project as "lifelogging" technology and plans to ship its first finished cameras in February next year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9627426/Wearable-camera-encourages-owners-to-record-entire-lives.html