Daily Archives: December 2, 2013

Connected Through Music; Sight and Sound

Headphones by DenisseDLC

Headphones by DenisseDLC

This Thanksgiving weekend I felt like getting in touch with music, something that I hadn’t done in a while. And by getting in touch with music, I mean catching up on songs I have been listening to on YouTube but never actually downloaded because of time constraints.

 

I started to make a list of music and realized that I had a lot of catching up to do. As I downloaded music, I was trying to imagine what parts of songs I could use for an upcoming film project I’m working on. It dawned on me how interesting sight and sounds work for people. I was correlating different images in my head to specific combinations of music lyrics and beats of songs. It really demonstrates how interconnected our visual sense is to our hearing.

 

How many times has a smell triggered a specific memory? Or a sound make you think “where have I heard that before?” and then you remember, or you can’t remember a specific moment through your imagery.

 

It’s truly fascinating how things connect in our minds when we naturally use our senses.

 

My project has a couple of scenes where I am walking around my home town of New York City. As I was re-watching those scenes, the music that connected with them connected more with me than that of a scene I took as I was walking here in Vermont.

 

Music has a way of pulling at your heartstrings, or lightening the mood after a heavy scene in a film. It’s a medium that impacts us in many different ways. I keep having all these thoughts that relate back to that idea. Just like when I was teaching a Middle School class at MUMS here in Middlebury, the aspect of the lesson that we focused on was Digital Media Grammar. The demonstration that we showed the kids was that of the genderremixer website and then we gave them a prompt that implied what they would do if they could make their own toothpaste commercial. Lots of the responses were very different because of the musical direction that the children chose to take.

 

All in all, whether the music be in commercials, or on a film or even something that triggers a memory, music has some serious ties to imagery and I hadn’t’t even thought of it until I was catching up on some music downloads.

Traveling

Just when I thought my trip to Middlebury in September couldn’t have been worse, I experienced a new level of bad luck. My first flight yesterday from California to Philly went very smoothly, and my second flight seemed to be on time. We got on board and went out to the runway where we sat for at least 45 minutes before the pilot told us that the weather in Burlington was so bad that they couldn’t land and that we had to sit it out for a couple hours. So a bunch of other midd kids and I were just hanging out in the airport for an hour or so waiting to hear back from US airways as to whether we would be able to get there or not. By this time I had been traveling for 12 hours. I went to the gate to check with an attendant about the flight and sure enough there was no one there to answer questions. I noticed the pilots coming off the plane ready to head home, when I knew there was something wrong. If the pilots are leaving how would we ever get there? The pilots apologized and told us that the flight was canceled and that they had no idea why no one had told us that already. Everyone was all just so oblivious to it all. It was a good thing I ran down the pilots before they left the airport because otherwise everyone would have been just waiting there for hours. So the next step was to wait in this two hour long line to get our flights rescheduled. Sure enough no flights were available for the next couple days unless you wanted to pay a fortune and switch airlines. Everyone was hectically trying to figure out an alternative route whether by different airport, car, or train. People were also figuring out where they would stay for the evening. This ties my blog post to the digital media aspect as literally every single person in line trying to figure out new planes was using some sort of device, mostly iPhones and Droids to make other accommodations. What would life have been life if we didn’t have our phones. I honestly don’t know what I would have done. Our phones are so crucial at moments like these that without them we would have been stranded. In my case, I was able to contact a friend at nearby Swarthmore College and stay with there for the night, and then book a 6:30 am morning amtrak to New york and then up to Vermont all using my little iPhone.\

People using their mobile devices to find alternative routes

People using their mobile devices to find alternative routes

My Thoughts on Snapchat: WACK, and no one realizes it.

“Why do people snapchat?,” I asked various friends over Thanksgiving break and at Midd. “It’s fun!” “It’s funny.” “I like to see what people are up to.” “It lets me share what I’m doing with friends.” My next question, and a question I usually only ask myself internally, is do people realize how Snapchat affects their every day lives? In such negative ways.

Given, this is coming from Sarah Gledhill, an active proponent of putting down technology to center oneself, but I really do think that people have caught on to a trend without realizing the consequences of it. We need to be more aware of how our decisions with technology affect our lives.

Over break, I had the pleasure of seeing a lot of old friends from high school. We went to an MGMT concert on Wednesday night, and I kept noticing something: in the middle of conversations, my friends would completely zone out of what I was saying to make a funny face at their camera phone to send to a friend on Snapchat. They stared at their screens to record the concert in short segments just to send it to someone who would see it once and then never again. At a party I went to on Friday night, it felt like every ten minutes I saw someone take a “selfie” on Snapchat to send to someone who wasn’t at the party. Snapchat, I realized, had a profound affect on my own Thanksgiving break despite the fact that I don’t even have it. Numerous conversations I had were rudely interrupted by the app, which took away from the very short, precious time that I had with these people I don’t get to see very often.

I guess my overall opinion of the application is that SNAPCHAT IS WACK. It interrupts your life constantly throughout the day, it pushes the people you are actually with away, it encourages people to constantly document their lives rather than to just live them, and, honestly, it disrupts your psyche. Snapchat makes people distracted, disconnected, and rude. If no one had it, we would all have better conversations and more quality time with each other.

The other side of the argument, I find, isn’t too appealing. People always counter my arguments with, “It’s just really fun.” Sure, maybe seeing what other people are up to is “fun,” maybe some of your friends send hilarious selfies, but it fosters a type of social combativeness that I don’t enjoy. I’ve been photographed in numerous Snapchats sent to people I don’t know – why are people allowed to do that? To take a picture of the people you’re with to show to someone else? I would so much rather not be “shown” off in a Snapchat. For me, it’s a sign of lack of self-confidence. The ability to be where you are with the people you’re with without needing to know what others are doing or needing to show others what you’re doing is being comfortable with yourself, and Snapchat encourages the very opposite.

I’m ranting. I’m making generalizations. But I don’t care. Snapchat is wack, and I’m waiting for someone to offer an argument that will change my mind.