A prospective student walked in while we were “studying” Beatles Rock Band in class today…this struck us all as ironic–how can something so fun be “academic?”  I’ve watched Project Runway in a sociology class, read magazines in another Film and Media course, and attended screenings of the Simpson’s, Seinfeld, and the Hills.  My friends make fun of me for this, and I often find myself at a loss when it comes time to explain just how one could possibly identify any of these manifestations of pop culture as an academic category.  I have even questioned my own decision to take such classes.  I remember now a reading from the beginning of the semester in which the writer pointed out that fish don’t know that they’re swimming in water, people don’t pay attention to the fact that we are breathing in air, etc…these classes have taught me to pay attention to the world that I and my friends actively consume, but that many of my friends don’t attempt to understand in the ways that we do in these courses.  These classes, while they might sound frivolous or too fun to be worthwhile teach two things: first, media literacy; and second, that valuable learning doesn’t have to be traditional and it can happen outside of erserves and textbooks.

I really enjoyed the documentary “RiP!: A Remix Manifesto.”  I thought it did a great job of both explaining and illustrating many of the contemporary issues of copyright issues and cultural change that we have been discussing in class.  Not only that, but it made critiques about certain media by remixing those media… it was like one very long project for Media Technology and Cultural Change.

I found the film entertaining because a lot of it had to do with the work of Girl Talk, who happens to be an artist who I enjoy very much.  It was entertaining to see him work, hear his thoughts on copyright law, and especially see his concerts.  At the point in the film where the recording of a Girl Talk performance is muted because “[Gaylor’s] point had already been made, so using the clip was no longer fair use,” i was genuinely disappointed, but the message was perfectly illustrated.

Another thing that I found interesting was the interactive way in which I watched the film.  As it would happen, I missed the screening of the film here at Midd, but luckily for me it was available online.  The way in which they showed the film online, however, was they played it as twelve separate chapters of the film.  At the end of each chapter the Brett Gaylor (the director), would appear and ask viewers at home to think of new ways to remix the chapter they had just seen.  Whether it be adding a remix of their own, or a different soundtrack, or anything, the idea is that the film about remixes is attempting to be remixed itself.  Online viewers can upload their remixed version to the website, and eventually Gaylor will be releasing a RiP! 2.0.  I just thought this form of viewer participation was very interesting.  It addressed one idea that I took away from the film, which was that if enough people get involved and make changes themselves, the lines of copyright and ownership become more and more blurred.

All and all, I really like the documentary.

So I finally took the tour and did my second life snapshots.  While I am still somewhat hesitant about second life, I did have some fun going to the different places and trying to take good pictures next to interesting stuff.  Here they are:

Here is me with the librarian:

Me at the Moulin Rouge in Paris 1900:

Me in space, chatting it up:

Me at Colorado Tech:

Me at the Space Museum:

Me In Austrailia:

Me in an Irish Pub:

Man, seeing these great photos of my avatar in fun places is way cooler than actually going there myself!!!

ABC Nightly news with Brian Williams is a program that millions tune into across the country as a source for what’s going on in the nation and the world on a regular basis. I personally have replaced watching the news on TV with reading it online or watching little clips here and there on the internet. It works with my schedule, I get to watch/read whenever I want and don’t have to deal with (many) commercials.

After spending time with my grandfather during break, who tunes in on a nightly basis, I saw how little has changed about the nightly broadcast. There was one major thing that I have never seen before though that caught my eye. At the end of the broadcast while the credits rolled, they had four icons across the bottom under the words “To get this broadcast”. The Facebook “F”, the Twitter “T”, the RSS squiggles, and the Podcast “i” icon are all there popping out like candy on the screen in their colorful “shorthand” icons.

ABC has recognized that in the modern day, many people either have converted to digital/internet media for collecting their information and they really don’t want to miss out. If you had told them five years ago that to keep their following they would have to convert their broadcast into four different electronic versions, they would probably tell you you’re crazy and that everybody following them watches TV. Now, they have stayed up with the latest and turned a half hour TV show into many other forms of communication.

How you condense that into 140 characters or a wall post… I’m not sure but, they have found ways of making it work to get their program to the masses. I think that it is interesting also that you see it at the end of the broadcast. They don’t put it in the beginning saying if you don’t want to watch this whole thing or don’t want the commercials then look at our online sources for giving you the news. It is only after the broadcast is over that they advertise other possible ways. It would be interesting to see how the five different ways of collecting their news are different and what is cut out in certain ones.

Life on the run is always shifting and thankfully, industries are noticing that and tailoring their products to help go along seamlessly with the shift. I’m sure that the daily commuter appreciates being able to bring up the highlights of the newscast on their blackberry from the same firsthand source that they would have gotten the information from on TV.

Just saw the 3 oclock showing of the Rip movie.  Good stuff!  I was worried at the start; it seemed a bit like a less-nuanced version of a lot of the material we’ve covered already.  That “CopyRIGHT” and “CopyLEFT” business, for one, was pretty brazen and kinda oversimplified, I thought.  Basically, he boiled every problem with intellectual property in our culture down to corporate greed and oppression, which ignores the part we all play in these problems by supporting the established norms.

But I really got into the film as it went along, and I think it’s unsubtle flashiness was one of its strengths.  It did more or less cover stuff we’ve already talked about, w/ Lessig’s book and our related discussions, but it did it concisely and compellingly, and his knack for visual flare and seamless integration of bits and pieces of borrowed culture was really impressive.  I think the “culture crusader” tone that the film takes on is different than, say, Lessig’s reasoned and measured take, but one is not necessarily better or worse.  I think that tone in Rip might even be better suited to empowering and inspiring people to take charge of their own consumption of culture, which is what he was aiming to do.

I certainly felt inspired leaving the film, and even a little proud of the piece of electronic music I’ve been working on lately, which samples “Sycamore Trees” by Jimmy Scott, a song which I heard through its use in a Twin Peaks episode.  I had kind of taken the fact that I was essentially remixing this song for granted, probably because doing it for an obscure song like that feels different from remixing/’ripping off’ Lady Gaga or whoever — artists on the scale of the ones that Girl Talk uses in his remixes.  But watching this film reminded me that doing this can be a ‘culturally significant’ act…I think?  Since I’ve grown up with this kind of thing all around me, it doesn’t feel like this big ideological stand (unlike the M.L.F. guy’s actions, which were hilarious and badass), but I guess I should take pride in my little participation in R/W culture.

SPIEGEL: “…But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?… Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?”

Eco: “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

This very insightful (and relatively short) interview with Umberto Eco was conducted in the lead up to the opening of an exhibit that he curated at the Louvre, an exhibit studying the nature of lists, and the places that they show up in literature and the visual arts.  They cover a lot of concepts, and many of them are beyond the theoretical scope of our class, but it’s still very interesting.  First, he discusses how making lists is one of our fundamental cultural impulses — as with all art, it’s a way of trying to impose order upon infinity, or chaos.  He segues into that point which I included up top there, that we do it to try to escape our thought about death.  Whee!

But then, near the end, they move on to discuss lists as a form of filtering, which strikes closer to some of the issues we’ve discussed in this class.  We’ve talked about how our modern, networked culture provides us with access to more content than we can ever possibly process; the idea of “publish, then filter”.  And we talked about how we all rely on certain sources, whether they be websites or people or whatever, to help us choose what culture we want to consume.  And often, this comes down to listmaking, whether implicitly or explicitly.  We LOVE lists in our culture!  There’s countless lists of the “best ___s of the year” published at the end of every year.  Personally I have kind of a guilty feeling about this (I feel it sort of goes against the artistic spirit when I listen to music throughout the year thinking about where it will fall in my year-end list), but I also think there’s a necessity to it, now, and it’s also kind of fun.

And they even touch on Google in the Eco interview.  He thinks it might be a bit dangerous because it gives us the illusion that we don’t have to be discriminating when searching for information, that Google will do all of that for us.  Eco says, “…in school when dealing with the Internet, the teacher should say: ‘Choose any old subject, whether it be German history or the life of ants. Search 25 different Web pages and, by comparing them, try to figure out which one has good information.’ If 10 pages describe the same thing, it can be a sign that the information printed there is correct. But it can also be a sign that some sites merely copied the others’ mistakes.”

I absolutely agree with this sentiment, and that’s why it has always annoyed me when teachers preach against Wikipedia; one just has to learn to be a discerning reader of Wikipedia.  I think learning to be discerning should be more emphasized.  And it’s a subset of media literacy in general, which obviously needs to be more emphasized.

Finally, I’ll close with one of Eco’s little wisdoms that he says near the end of the interview.  In discussing his giant personal library, he says: “Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.”

At last, at last, here is my remix! I chose to use video clips from the AMAZING tv show Madmen! The story takes place in the beginning of the 60′s, in New York City and we follow Donald Drapper, handsome middle-aged man working in an advertising company. Those of you who know the show were probably striken by the relationships between men and women. I then chose to work on this theme.

Concerning the audio, I chose the song “Possession” by the Dirtbombs, an amazing garage band from Detroit. I highly recommend buying their cds if you like their music because they are modest, talented and rock as hell!

Few pictures from 2nd life, the “game”/virtual universe that puzzles me more and more. The pictures are….. well ugly! This is due in part because the environment does not load completely but also because the graphics are quite dated. Nevertheless we can see sometimes true creative works in 2nd life. I think this game is a way too ambitious project for the technology used to run it. I bet that in a decade, immersion will be more complete. We could think about how new coming technologies such as 3d image or movement recognition would embetter the experience.

So I’m gonna have to agree with the rest of the class and say that Second Life pretty much blows. It’s like a slower, lonelier, and more boring version of the Sims. The fact of the matter is that while I was on Second Life I think I ran into a total number of 3 people. Also you can’t really do all that much without any money, and we all only have $500. Anyways, here are some pictures of my time in the world of Second Life, while some of the locations are pretty interesting to look at graphically, I would still say that the ability to visit different exotic landmarks is not enough of a factor to entice me to use Second Life. Also I don’t understand why sometimes I have hair and sometimes I’m bald on Second Life.

This is me at the Welcome to Second Life sign it’s on the far right. This is me at the space museum. On the Middlebury Island I took a Picture in front of a sign that reserved the area for Spanish speakers only, which I though was kind of funny.

Here is me in Australia.

Here is me in at the Space Museum.

Here is me in front of a religious park, random I know.

Here is me at the Moulin Rouge.

Here is me in Morocco, which looked pretty cool actually.

Reading everyone’s posts, I think it’s hilarious how uninterested in it we all are so far.  And I agree completely.  It was a relief to exit the world after having to mess around on it for a while last night.  Maybe my pictures will help to express my distaste.

So I went to hang out at the bookstore (whose fonts/banners look like they’re straight out of a Geocities page ca. 1996, btw), and I tried to sit in this chill lounge chair.  It automatically put me in this pose, which I thought was kinda funny.

Unfortunately, when I teleported to the orientation place, I remained stuck in this position.  Though I could still “walk around”, I could not stand up.

The same was true at the space flight center.  Even when I flew around.  Also, couldn’t really figure out what to do here, except……look at the rockets.

Eventually, I had to quit the program and reopen it so my avatar wouldn’t be trapped in that ridiculous position.  Flaws and glitches like this, at a very basic level of a game (or…virtual…thing), bother me quite a bit.  Why should I spend my time using a program that can even do such a simple thing right?  Anyway, when I came back, I went to the Middlebury island.  Was something supposed to be related to politics here?  I couldn’t figure it out.  So I watched the creepy movie.

IT WAS HILARIOUS

I checked out the Colorado Tech campus.  YEEHAW

Virtual Morocco!!  That’ll be cool!  Or, it won’t.  Maybe it’ll just look like this for 10 minutes until it loads…

Chillin in virtual Paris in a buggy.  I gave it some time to load until it was actually complete.  Still, just a bunch of fake buildings…many video games could plunge me into much more visually stimulating environments.  I dunno.  I’m trying to keep an open mind, and I’m ready to be convinced of the magic of Second Life, but I’m unimpressed as of now.

Not into second life.  Nothing about it makes sense to me…why do I want to be in these virtual worlds alone?  I don’t find the “escapism” that it offers very relieving, rather, it just feels weird.  I was approached by two guys at one point and wasn’t sure what to do, whether they were real, what they wanted, what was appropriate…I just walked away.  They were definitely flirting with my avatar.  It was really confusing.  I don’t know how to go to the places that we were invited as a class (yet another confusing aspect of this bizarre game) so I went to some easter egg hunt that I didn’t know how to participate in and also to Faery Land or something and finally to Atlantis…

I don’t know how to post pictures to the blog…stay tuned.

So, here are my 7 snapshots. I really don’t like how slow some of the worlds load…it’s like waiting for something to unfold. I am also not a fan of when random people came up to talk to me when I was trying to get this done. However, it is really cool that people create these virtual worlds where you can meet up virtually. I just wish that everything was a little faster. My favorite place that I visited was the Spaceflight Museum. Paris, was okay, too.

Dublin

Library

Middlebury College

NMC Orientation

Paris

Space Flight Museum

Well my title pretty much explains everything that I have to say about Second Life as of now.  Now granted I am making this very bold statement based on only one experience using Second Life, but regardless this was is my first impression…

I did not like Second Life.  The concept of a giant not-real world is scary to me.  I can’t possibly imagine myself spending the hours and hours and hours that people do in S.L. adjusting their appearance, purchasing items, and flying around and talking to people.  I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the idea of it.  I don’t know why people would care about how a poor-graphics avatar looks instead of how they actually look.  I don’t get why you would worry about how many fake Second Life dollars you have instead of worrying about how many actual dollars you have.  I simply cannot comprehend any of it.  And the fact that so many people exist in this world, and the fact that the world is so huge and infinite completely (to repeat myself) FREAKED ME OUT.

All of that said, what I gather from class is that we are going to be examining S.L some more, and I will probably have to use it and figure out what the appeal is.  While I fear the unknown now, perhaps learning more about it will change.  To be honest I was hesitant about picking up twitter, and now after trying it I kind of like it, so maybe S.L will be the same.  But for now, it scares me and I don’t understand it… and that’s my preliminary analysis.

All of these new things that I am being introduced to, now Second Life, I can barely handle first life!  It is so much to take in for someone that thought I knew ALOT about the internet.  From Twitter and Blogging to creating Avatars and SecondLife.  I spent a little longer then I realized this afternoon browsing around on Second Life and visiting the sites that we were assigned to, and much to my surprise found some pretty neat stuff.  The first place that I went was the Library that was recommended to us.

While walking around I didn’t really see anyone then noticed all of the computers with little titles over them.  People created a virtual library with links to just about everything.  It intrigues me in that it is a way of filtering through the internet.  As Lessig talked about, a great example of collaborative action.  Every contributes their links for the greater good of the virtual library.  This process works especially well with REAL librarians all over the world making sure that everything checks out (pun intended).  I clicked on the Cowboy Adventures computer and found myself lost, browsing through places on the web I would have never seen.  Next stop was the NMC Information Mall.

I found this to be quite helpful because of the lack of knowledge I have about how the Second Life world works or even really what it is.  I watched the “Advanced Camera Techniques” video that was literally posted on a wall in the mall(http://tinyurl.com/m8o98r) Definitely watch it.  It has proven to be very helpful for helping me take these pictures and manipulate the camera the way that I want to.  Thinking about it, this could also be a really cool way to do some “pre-visualizations” for shooting a real movie.  Other then the camera flying away, most of the moves that the camera does are completely replicable.  If someone were to build a house in Second Life that was like the movie set, they could essentially block out all of their shots before hand or have a pretty good idea of what looks good and what they like.  Just a thought.  Moving on, I went to the Space Station.

Taking a few pictures and browsing around just as if I were a real tourist, I then set up in the air and flew around to peek at the models of space ships that had been created for the island.  A nice stop on my world tour, it really went to show that people really are building ANYTHING in this world.  A few more teleports, and I found myself at the Middlebury College Terra Project.

Not only do they only speak spanish in this “building” but they say it outside on big billboards that plaster the walls.  Just like the article about “Second Life rape”, anyone could just as easily violate the rules here and run in speaking English without anything stopping them and without a voodoo doll.  It really just comes down to respecting what people ask for and ask you not to do because to the best of my knowledge there are no Second Life police yet!  I stopped in and admired the artwork on display in the gallery here and then headed out to catch sunset in Dublin.

One of the glitches about a program like this is the speed at which a “world” loads.  I had a lot of trouble here because of how long it took to load everything (buildings, posters, modeling, textures, music playing in the streets etc.)  That did not stop me from doing some wandering though.  Dublin had some cool stores and buildings.  In one, I found the “Dublin Literary Pub Crawl” which apparently was a quest I could set out on to combine finding great literary works and great Dublin bars.  I did not indulge because of all the literary works I have to deal with tonight in First Life but I am sure that it would have been an interesting journey to go on.

I ended my adventure flying around Dublin and admiring the sunset that reflected off of the endless ocean, separating this island from the next.  Though time consuming with all of the loading, I enjoyed the sharing and community that this online world has to offer.  It can be used in many ways and I’m sure that as time goes on, they will only keep expanding.