Monthly Archives: February 2010

Here Comes Shirky

I was just talking to my mom and realized I never commented on Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody. My mom’s been following my blog, keeping up with the new posts just to see what we’re talking about in class and all that jazz, and she said that it’s been inspiring her to maybe create her own blog. Called “Good Day Bad Day.” I think that was it anyway. But she said something that brought me right back to some of Shirky’s points….she said, “I don’t wanna do it to like, tell people stuff or something. I just wanna do it for myself. Like a journal.” So she wants to make a blog, because it “looks like fun” and so she can “write down” anything she wants about her days. But she has no intention of doing it for purposes of sharing with anyone else. Mittell reinforced Shirky’s point of people posting to the web for purposes of self publishing IN public, but not FOR the public. My mom just proved that point to be true. At least for her case. But then I don’t really understand why she wouldn’t just actually write in a journal. Or if she wanted to type, put it in a word document. I mean, then you don’t have to worry about having internet access to read it, or the potential for your computer to crash and lose everything. A handwritten journal stays in a drawer, where only you know where it is,

Anyway…I digress. I found this to be an interesting point though, about publishing in public but not for the public. I realized most of us do the same thing on Facebook every time we post on a friend’s wall. We are communicating to them in a public environment, but not actually intending for that whole public to read what we wrote. Then again, sometimes maybe that kind of thing IS for the public, whether we realize/admit to it or not. Perfect example: This morning a friend of mine at Princeton posted on my wall “hey have you heard this?” with a link to the Midd Kid rap song. So I posted back cluing him into the fact that yes…most Midd kids know the Midd Kid song…and put a link to the music video.  I was posting to HIM specifically, but there’s a good part of me that hopes other people will also see the video on his wall and continue to spread the word.

He and his friends will hopefully be going to YouTube and doing what Shirky calls “filtering.” I’ve also filtered by promoting the video and helping to lead others to it. I’ve also filtered on my own Facebook page by keeping only what I want on my wall, in my pictures, etc. Shirky makes us realize that on the internet, we are one and the same person in the eyes of everyone who is looking at us. In the real world, thats not usually how it is. We are different in different situations, with different people, as much as we might like to think we’re consistent throughout. This is why its often a hard decision whether or not to accept friend requests from teachers, parents, or co-workers… not just the friends who we hang out and take pictures with. But maybe we will lessen this aspect of filtering over time and these new facets of technology will only continue to change our social behavior, making our selves more similar in all different social situations…. Where will THAT take us?

Earthquakes scaring the tweets out of us

Like Molly said… I’m not procrastinating. My other work has actually led me back to my blog… For my science class I’ve been looking up recent earthquakes and volcanic activity. In multiple articles, I read about people “tweeting” about earthquakes….just moments after they’ve hit.

NYtimes.com…after a 4.1 earthquake –

“Ms. Evans, who is the owner of Sevans Strategy, a public relations strategy firm that guides companies on how to use Twitter and other social media, said she then reached for heriPhone and posted a message on Twitter. ‘Seriously weird,’ she wrote. ‘Something that felt like a minor quake just woke us up. Can anyone else in the CHI area/burbs confirm?’

Soon, she said, many people were trading information about the quake through the forum.”

I went on to twitter and typed the message in myself, to make sure it actually fit and could have been the accurate post. It’s less than 140 characters. I’m glad Ms.Evans could communicate with her Twitter followers, and talk about an exciting natural event… but did she really need a confirmation from others on her iphone, to believe she really just felt a small earthquake? Okay, maybe she wasn’t positive exactly what it was… but she knew she felt something, period. In fact, she described the whole house shaking, as if a train just blew by. She didn’t need anyone to confirm THAT for her.

Los Angeles Times…after a 6.0 earthquake:

“On Twitter, some residents said they felt a sharp jolt, but they added that it did not feel as strong as the January quake.”

You might think after feeling an earthquake and questioning its origins, one might call to make sure family and friends are okay. Instead, people are instantaneously reaching for their cell phones and interacting with an electronic version of “friends”… people they may not even know.

Google overload: a cartoon

I just came across this cartoon on nytimes.com. (I actually found pictures of the olympics craziest fans, then watched an informational animation of the Westminster dog show, before being linked to this…oh the internet.) It’s a short spoof about all the new google products, and the potential for overload. It just shows HOW many options we have on our electronics that probably really don’t need to be there. As the “sales voice” describes all the features, he stumbles and gets lost talking about them, and trails off, implicating that we also may not even know what half the buttons do in different media these days….Are we trying too hard to be too connected all the time?

I don’t know how to put the video in here unless its from youtube…and I couldn’t find it there…so go to this link. OR get connected through my twitter status…twitter tweet? Lingo.I just remembered twitter is actually where it all started. I followed Times’ tweet to the pictures of crazy olympic fans…

enjoy!

http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,68221307001_1967626,00.html

Snow day!

“You have received the following message on February twenty fourth, twenty ten at 10:25am. Power has now been restored on campus and classes will resume today at 12:15. Thanks for your patience with this delay. Press 1 to respond and confirm I have received this message. Press star to repeat this message… Your response has been recorded. Goodbye.”

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This morning I woke up to my suitemate knocking on my door, and excitedly exclaiming that, the power was out. It was like third grade all over again, looking out my window at all the snow, my clock radio dead, and feeling that desperate wish for a snow day. With the power out and the Internet down, I realized that I didn’t know how to find out if classes were cancelled or not. My suitemate and I called public safety on our cell phones asking, but they had no answer as to whether or not class was on. Hanging up our cell phones, we remembered that there is an automated phone message sent out, both as a call and text. We are always connected. There is always a way. Had it been 1994 and the power was out, I’m actually not sure how we would have found out about school closing, because the phone lines would have been dead and I wouldn’t have had a cell phone. I guess we listened on the radio for schools to be listed… Now I get a personalized, auto voicemail, and a text message from that weird 55626 number.

“This message is for Hannah, Katharine, Epstein….”

It’s great that we are able to be updated so easily due to our technology in cell phones, but today I actually wished we had been less connected. Without cell phones and the ability to update us every three hours, classes would have had to have been cancelled in the morning and remained cancelled through the day.

I am happy about other technology on snow days, such as my digital camera and e-mail. My mom would love to be in this snowstorm more than anyone I know. Unfortunately she’s stuck in New Jersey, and not here to see it. But this morning I was able to go out in the snow for an hour with my camera, and easily e-mail a bunch of images to her. Now anyone checking my blog can also see what a storm we got.

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P.s. At breakfast my friend said, “Nat would be the most ill prepared person for a disaster.” ….. because his cell phone was dead. Are we really THAT reliant on technology, that we think we’d be lost in a natural disaster without it?! Come on people… we must have SOME survival skills leftover from our cave man days…

Spongebob’s found his voice

kenny01_tomKenny_spongebobUntil this week, I thought that podcasting was strictly for audio.  I didn’t even really know how to find podcasts. I mean, I knew you could search for them on itunes, but I figured there had to be another, more complicated way of finding them online. Surprise surprise, all I had to do to find them was Google “subject” + podcast and I was given a variety of options. Once I chose a website, I clicked on the podcast I wanted to listen to, and where did I end up… back in itunes.

I searched for podcasts on npr, and found different categories of podcasts to choose from. I chose “radio pictures” thinking it might be about photography, and found a podcast about the voices of SpongeBob! I bet you never knew who the voice of SpongeBob actually is – the real man. There’s probably not a kid in the nation who wouldn’t recognize SpongeBob’s laugh, but anyone of them could probably walk into Tom Kenny and not know who he was. His natural speaking voice isn’t recognizable from any of the voices he does on the show: SpongeBob, Gary, Mr. SquarePants, French Narrator, Patchy the Pirate, and other miscellaneous characters. One man is able to be more than six different characters on a tv show, because the medium only reveals his voice, not his image. Instead his image is replaced by the cartoon images of Bikini Bottom.

This podcast uses both video and audio, so it has the feel of a humorous but informative “short.” By using both image and audio, it differs from what I thought podcasts to be, because I am participating by not only listening but also seeing. This specific podcast is interesting to think about, because with any general audio podcast, you are left to form an image in your imagination, of what the people might look like, or the subject they are talking about. However, because this podcast is using one medium to converse about another visual medium which is universally known, I hear the voice of SpongeBob and if I look away from the screen, I visualize SpongeBob’s distinct television image. It also offers me a new visual image to link to SpongBob’s voice – the man of the voice himself. The interviews are cut with snippets of the actors reading in the cartoon voices, and then also mixed with snippets of the show itself. It’s a podcast describing the medium of voice and animation, which creates the medium of a television show….all of these media have been transformed into podcast form.

People should definitely check out these podcasts in npr’s “radio pictures.” There are some other really informative casts about photographers and musicians, and its cool to be able to see the art, while listening to it being discussed.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/npr-radio-pictures-podcast/id290787437

“Sundance: Snow and Stars vs. Twitter and Google Alerts”

Over j-term I went to the first few days of the Sundance Film Festival out in Park City, Utah. I had the specialDISAGREE opportunity to go as the niece of one of the presenting filmmakers. My uncle, Rob Epstein, was at Sundance to premier his film “Howl.” I got to experience the festival in a different way than most, as I had a press pass. Keeping my tag around my neck, I was official press for Telling Pictures, (my uncles’ independent film company). I got to carry around my camera and tripod everywhere I went and shoot almost anything I wanted, accumulating great footage for my final Sight & Sound I project. What I’m getting at here is that it was an awesome experience being there – an experience you can’t get by watching the festivities online or on TV, even if they are streamed in live time. Other people, however, are questioning my opinion on this idea. Today I found an article in The New York Times, “Sundance: Snow and Stars vs. Twitter and Google Alerts.” It responds to the question, “in the digital age, do you really have to trek to Sundance?” The article talks about the fact that with all our new technology and ways of being constantly updated, people may no longer need to actually GO to events like Sundance. They can simply watch the premiers streamed on their computer or on the Sundance channel, from the comfort of their own homes. No need to worry about snow and travel plans! J.C. Sprink said, “The spirit of Sundance is still there, but film festivals over all are becoming less crucial. You can have a festival every night in your house online. You can now attend Sundance from afar.” I strongly disagree. While I agree with Redford that the downgrade in ambush marketers due to the recession is good for clearing up the streets, I think it’s crap to say that you can “have a film festival every night in your house.” Films are an art form. Each one is created to be viewed in a certain way. Every word in the script is written down for a reason. Every shadow and every piece of furniture were angled just so, in each shot. Every level of audio was put at the perfect level to mix well. Watching my uncle’s film in a huge theater full of appreciative, respectful viewers, was the only way I can imagine seeing his film for the first time. Even with my little experience and just beginners film classes, I can no longer watch any movie in my living room with my family, because I get mad at my mom for getting up to make tea or for my brother being online on his laptop. I can’t imagine someone watching the premier of my uncle’s film, or any other Sundance film, in this manner. I don’t want to miss anything that’s shown on screen, or any word that is said. The environment was like this at Sundance. People were interested in what was on the screen, they turned off their phones, and did not leave their seats or say a word through the film’s entirety. At the end of the film the theater burst into clapping – no one left during the credit sequence. As the lights came up, my uncle and his co-director walked back on stage as the audience clapped for them and their successful work. I had never been in an environment like this where it felt like people really appreciated a movie as a work of art, rather than just a rainy day activity during which you can eat fatty foods covered in butter.

AGREE

I obviously had special circumstances being with my uncle at the red carpet, press conference, and cast parties, but I still feel that the act of actually going to the festival is an experience that no one can replicate by watching it on TV at home, or by following the events in 140-character statements on Twitter. I don’t care how good technology gets. Its great for so many things, but at this point I believe that technology is technology, and your computer screen can never replace real life.

comics on comics

comic? not great Gutters…

lexSequnce!

“wait, are you just…reading comics for the fun of it?”

“what class is THAT for? I gotta get me into that”

“hahaha THAT’S your textbook?”

Simply pulling my book out from my backpack provoked the lowly responses to a comic book that McCloud talks about. Somehow over the course of history, we’ve lost the ability to recognize the importance and complexity of comics. McCloud made me realize that we’ve more or less made the comic BOOK out to be the only form of COMIC. We’ve made that single object the entirety of the category of comics and have become unaware of how prevalent comics actually are in everyday life, and very important parts of everyday life no less. We learn life-saving techniques through comics every time we board an airplane, and we create our own comics (starring ourselves) when we step into a photo booth and snap a sequence of four pictures. McCloud points out that for some reason, calling something a safety DIAGRAM makes it sound more official and serious. Comic would take on a less serious undertone because of the connotation we have given to the term, when in actuality the “diagrams” showing us how to put on an oxygen mask fit the definition of a “comic.”

I also never realized how comics were developed through the course of history. I’ve taken many art history courses and studied all the works that McCloud referenced… works like the Bayeux tapestry and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ye I never saw them as anything remotely similar to comics.

McCloud’s ideas of icons struck me as crossing into Ong’s territory of discussion. Ong makes me think about how writing is far from actual language. It is merely a fixed version of a language, on different media, unable to express itself in the variety of ways that speech can. Written language is unable to respond to the unique circumstances of the moment during which something is said. Writing is a system of markings on paper… ICONS. McCloud makes us aware of how everything on the page is really just an icon… The drawing of a pipe is not a pipe, not even a drawing of a pipe, but a reproduction of a drawing of a pipe.  Yet we go through the process of closure to interpret the images on the page as being real. Not only that, but we start to believe that we can HEAR and SMELL what’s on the page simply because of a few squiggly lines rising up from a trashcan or a dirty looking man.

McCloud’s book made me laugh out loud while I was reading it alone in my room. I found myself smiling when it told me to, and giggling when “he” said that I felt my cheeks bunch up, …because “he” was right, I did. Suddenly I was interacting with a line drawing on the page in front of me, who I’m now referring to as HIM. (The quotation marks were added in a second read…) I read a comic book about comic books and didn’t just learn about the world of comics or all the sophisticated thought that goes into creating each panel, but I myself was sucked into the panels and felt as though I became a character in McCloud’s comic world.

Smiley Face: Our self-centered icon

I just out of nowhere remembered the American Express commercial that plays on the iconography of the smiley face. I’m not a big tv watcher but this one stayed with me. It (visually) portrays exactly what McCloud says about the icon of the smiley face. Well, in the beginning of the video it’s a frown…

“The fact that your mind is capable of taking a circle, two dots and a line and turning them into a face is nothing short of incredible! But still more incredible is the fact that you cannot avoid seeing a face here. Your mind won’t let you!…We humans are a self-centered race. We see ourselves in everything. We assign identities and emotions where none exist. And we make the world over in our image.” -McCloud, Understanding Comics (pg 31-32)

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Waiting On The World To Change…Blogging on Blogs

Doing homework online is a difficult task… Distractions are endless when you’re looking at a blog, and every other sentence is in purple type, screaming, CLICK ME I’M A LINK!!! I am not a regular blogger… or at least, I haven’t been in the past. I guess we’re all getting into our own blogs now, but I have no specific blog that I follow on a regular basis. Today I decided to scope out the world of music in blog form and found myself at the Yahoo Music blogs, reading about a tearful and shameful John Mayer. “John Mayer Breaks Down in Tears After Public Apology,” to be exact. This post talks about John Mayer’s in-concert apology, for the things he said in a Playboy interview about his love life. Now feeling the aftermath of his words from angry and disappointed fans, he stood on stage claiming, “I quit the media game. I’m out. I’m done. I just want to play my guitar.” Looking past the content of this blog, it’s told in a variety of different languages. The on-line environment for distributing information has become one language, a melting pot of many other technological languages. I might say that I “read” this music blog, but really I read it, watched it, clicked it, scrolled it, and listened to it. The story is probably tenth generation by now, quoting sentences from other articles from online blogs or paper magazines, inserting Mayer’s tweets from Twitter, and publishing the average Joe’s YouTube video from the seventeenth row at the concert. (At E! online, you can watch it from the balcony, too). In the past fifteen minutes I’ve been shocked by John Mayer, sympathized with him, been totally disturbed by him, Tweeted him, and been confused as to how different his speaking voice is from his singing voice.

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All of these different emotions are brought about by the various types of electronic languages incorporated in the grammar of this blog. I didn’t know anything about the Playboy debacle or his public apology, until I read the Yahoo Blog. Therefore my first reaction was in response to the YouTube video of his apology…. Seemed nice enough. This subconsciously made me read the interview differently, in a more empathetic state of mind. Then you get not just the interview, but editor’s opinions interspersed between Mayer’s quotes. We’re like a block of fresh playdough being mashed every time we open a new tab on Safari – the different media shaping us to respond differently to each page containing the same content, spoken in a new language, looked at from a new angle.

A blog like this gets all your senses involves and makes you see the event from every aspect. We don’t just read about what John Mayer said, but we see him on stage and listen to him speaking. We then are taken to his Twitter page in one click, so that we can see him continuing to apologize. Here we read his apology in chunks – Not one fluid paragraph like we see in magazines, but in snippets of 140 characters each, showing up upside-down. Or backwards? Stacked. Above and below these snippets are the reactions of fans, supportive and disappointed. This of course brings me to a whole new discovery – that I’m sitting in bed on a Monday afternoon doing my homework, and all of a sudden I’ve been led to believe that I can chat with John Mayer. So I tweet him in response to a country song he likes… totally disregarding all comments about the media debacle.

I’ve gone from homework, to YouTube, to itunes, to Playboy, to Twitter, to country music, to blogging. It’s a never-ending cycle. Maybe I’ve just now been sucked in and won’t be able to climb out of the world of blogging and the many languages of technology.

Techno-Biography: Facebook, for better or for worse

FacebookGrabPicWith the different media that exists today, and with the way we use them, we can be in touch pretty much whenever we want, as much as we want. Sometimes it can even be more than we want. With Facebook you can be in touch with “friends” from any walk of life, and they can pop up at “home” whenever something new happens to them, whether you want to know about it or not. I have been sucked into the cyber world of Facebook and am a firm believer that it is, over all, a positive addition to my life. I, along with the rest of the world, have the ability to keep in touch with distant friends and family, better than ever before. The problem comes though, when friendships linger and fade, and you are no longer interested in hearing about someone else’s daily life. Unlike the actual, real life relationship, a “friend” tag on Facebook doesn’t fade with time if it’s supposed to. You have to consciously choose to “unfriend” someone if you feel your time is up. But that of course is a cyber sin, and will most likely make that old “friend” of yours unhappy, even though they weren’t keeping in touch anyway.

When my boyfriend and I broke up and we each moved on to new collegiate settings, Facebook was great for keeping in touch…  That is until I saw the numerous girls writing on his wall, “LOL”ing and publicizing their diet of three celery sticks per day. Watching his profile pictures change from shots of us jumping on the beach, to shots of him doing shots, didn’t help me move on. I watched myself be digitally moved to the past of his life. A couple months into school he actually said to me, “It’s so weird, people used to be able to tell we were dating, just by glancing at our Facebook pages… Now they could search through entire albums and not have a clue we ever knew each other.” Media like Facebook can almost… take over as an alternative life. It’s your laptop avatar. A second fabrication of you. It’s the “digital you” that people from afar get to see and know. We can self select how we want others to see us, by tagging or untagging photos of ourselves.

Speaking of photos – You never saw so many cameras out at everyday events or parties as you do with our generation. You would think by the number of cameras, that a weekend college dorm party was a once in a lifetime occurrence. I think for the average person with a pocket-sized digital camera there is a new concept and goal to the art of photography: it’s no longer art, or even a way to preserve a special moment in time, but rather a competition with peers to see who can snap the most posed candids… Oxymoron? …the sloppier the better. Then of course it’s a race to see who can put up all their pictures first, without being too eager and posting the day after. Play the game right, people. Learn the rules of the digital world. Then we run into those who still use their camera at events that don’t involve alcohol. Some people actually want to share their artwork… Networks like Facebook can be a great way to get your work out there. But how can you share your work without worrying that someone won’t just copy the picture into their own iphoto library? Macs are so easy. User friendly with the “click and drag” maneuver.

Lessons learned: Facebook and other social networks are great communication tools, but be wary with ex boyfriends. Newsfeeds and notifications can make the break up process take MUCH longer than it should. Sometimes it might just be best to rewind, unfriend, or block….dun dun dunnnn. Photographers – go to CVS. Kill a few trees in your life (sorry Greenies) and PRINT your artwork. Buy a frame and hang it in your house. Your mom will love it!