This weeks blog post was based closely around two sets of reading material, Predominantly, Highmore, Ben (2002) Principles of New Media. This text encourages us to explore the world we live in with a critical approach, Highmore, (2002) often describes everyday life as “a vague and problematic phrase”. When considering ‘Everyday Life’  it is important to consider how it is constructed, it is made up of various different characteristics, shared values and beliefs and is an evolving and challenging subject to analyse. Highmore, (2002) generally creates an impression that “Everyday life can both hide and make vivid a range of social differences” and its revolves closely around a sense of commonality. Both Freud and Marx indicated that the everyday life can be affected by both the conscious and subconscious elements of our day to day living, Freud in particular compares it psychoanalysis stating that “Whose  daily life has been, on occasion, disturbed by the ‘uninvited’ presence of a troubling memory?’, indicating that most people will find some sense of commonality even if they’re memories and perceptions differed drastically. If we stay on this idea of the subconscious influencing our daily life it means that studying the daily life can make invisible elements come to the surface.

Highmore (2002) begins to break down particular characteristic of everyday life into a series of tendencies which look something like this:

  •     Particular – General
  •    Agency – Structure
  •    Experiences/Feelings  – Institutions/Discourses
  •    Resistance – Power
  •    Micro-analysis – Macro-analysis

Marx and Engels (1985) stated that the “the self-understanding of a culture is produced from the ‘material life-process’ of society”. Highmore (2002) focuses more on the concept of ideology, “either ideology is both invisible and operative, or visible and contested. If ideology is the alibi that allows exploitative divisions to appear legitimate then the alibi  needs to be believed”  this begs to the idea that the everyday is made up from a combination of commonality, ideologies and shared values.

Another key point to consider as mentioned by Highmore, (2002) is that the term ‘Everyday Life’ is often used by politicians to gain power and make themselves feel accessible to ‘ordinary’ people which creates hierarchy and social divide; both stopping and creating segregation.

Today we also studied the basic principles of cinematography, We need to firmly understand these practices in order to accurately replicate them in our own work. Here they are…

Screen Shot 2015-10-07 at 09.27.42   We then created an short and simple clip that would demonstrate these principles, here it is…

References:

Manovich, Lev. (2002). Principles of New Media. In: The Language of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. pp 49-65

Highmore, Ben. (2002) Questioning the Everyday Life. In: The Everyday Life Reader. London: Roulade, pp 1-8

Psycho. (1960) [Online]. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. United States: Shamley Productions. Available from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WtDmbr9xyY&spfreload=10 [Accessed 7th October 2015]