Month: February 2008

meta-boyband

Friends of mine, DaVinci’s Notebook form Washington DC, wrote this as a template for a love song. The Community Christian Church then put it to a video. Enjoy, and remember it every time you hear a new love ballad.

[youtube BEQA1Y50Txo]

Seemed more appropriate than Another Irish Drinking Song…

google maps

I am continually amazed at how advanced our mapping technology is via the internet. It seems like every time I pay a visit to google maps, they have developed a new and closer way of getting directions.

There are now five different subcategories you can click on: map, street view, satellite, terrain, and traffic. I could spend hours typing in addresses and finding my house or neighborhood, or other familiar places. Especially with the new street view option which literally allows you to do a 360 from the address you entered. Incredible!

When I went to Belgium with my boyfriend for Christmas break, we used his iPhone religiously to get around the city and the country. iPhone has the google map icon which is just a click away and then you can do the same things as you would on the computer. Had we not had the iPhone, the trip could have been a disaster. Especially in a foreign country where we weren’t exactly fluent in French…

Podcast examples

Here are some examples of the podcast assignments done by last year’s class.

Our esteemed technology tutor Aaron did this project:

[audio:http://muskrat.middlebury.edu/lt/cr/faculty/jmittell-lt/fmmc0246a-s07-distribution/AshmittyPodcast.mp3]

Graduated student Astri von Arbin Ahlander did this one:

[audio:http://muskrat.middlebury.edu/lt/cr/faculty/jmittell-lt/fmmc0246a-s07-distribution/Astri/AstrisPodcast.mp3]

And here’s the clip of the This American Life show on the viral voicemail:

[audio:http://muskrat.middlebury.edu/lt/cr/faculty/jmittell-lt/TAL_Voicemail.mp3]

Thompson’s technobiography

This past summer my best friend decided that he was going to become a fashionista and started a blog to track new street fashions in Miami. Despite the fact that I had no prior experience with fashion or blogs, he enlisted me to write commentary and accompany him on his scouting missions. I forgot to mention: central to the blog was “scouting” or hunting the streets of Miami for well dressed people and then asking them to pose for the camera. This was definitely awkward for all parties involved. People were always concerned about the legitimacy of the site and of course, who the hell we were. People were well aware of their “digital identity” and were worried for good reason. Luckily for them, our intentions were strictly professional.

A few weeks into the process, we received a call from a reporter at the Miami Herald; they wanted to run a full page story on us! The reporter accompanied us on a scouting mission and took photos of us taking pictures (kind of blew my mind). Then the paper sent a professional photographer to take glamor shots of us. It was awesome. We were so excited we even purchased a URL for the site . Finally, the story ran and we felt like minor celebrities.

But all good things must come to an end. We both had to go back to school so we left the website in the hands of a cool but irresponsible girl. She took absolutely horrid photos and couldn’t write to save her life. Unfortunately the whole project went down the tubes once we both left for college.

If you got to the site please look at the older entries.

Audio Checklist

Have you ever sat down at a computer, put on your headphones and heard nothing? You swear you turned up the volume the last time you used them, yet now there isn’t even a hint of static.

Now imagine you are sitting at a computer that is being used continuously by many people, and you are left to the mercies of the last person who sat in the chair. Public computers take every challenge and multiply it exponentially.

Here is a checklist to help you figure out how to get your sound back if nothing is coming through:

From the Computer

  • Click on the Increase Volume Key, speaker with three lines, and make sure the volume is at sufficient level. This will also turn the sound back on if it has been muted.
  • In System Preferences choose Sound -> Output tab and test Line Out and Digital Out. The line that works depends on which audio port your headphones are connected to.

Application

  • Turn up sound in volume slider.
  • [Application Name] -> Preferences, make sure any sound settings are set to Line Out or Digital Out, whichever you have selected in the System Preferences.
  • In iMovie HD -> Preferences -> Playback, make sure “Play DV project through to DV camera is NOT checked.”

Headphones

  • If the headphones have an ON/OFF switch, turn headphones on.
  • The box is connected to the computer.
  • Headphones are connected to the box.
  • Master volume is turned up.
  • Volume is turned up on the channel where the headphones are plugged in.

Welcome to the Cladagram Room

Dinosaur Safari. This was my very first computer game, and it came out in 1994. The goal is to take the best pictures of all of the dinosaurs, from common and innocuous to rare and mostly instant-death. We ran it on my dad’s two-inch thick laptop, which could go for about an hour on its battery in the car, at which point it would be too hot to keep in your lap. This is exactly the version I had, which originally ran on a Windows I don’t remember the name of, and I have no idea why anyone would make it available for XP. I encourage all of you who are able to download it, which took about six minutes on my machine, and give it a whirl or just click on the link and look at the screencaps. It has no music, the graphics are exactly as shown, and it has the weirdest voiceover I’ve ever heard. That Ichthyosaursus swimming around down there used to scare the crap out of me, but look at the poor thing now. But someone has written an article about it and detailed the odd processes one must go through to get the poor little game to run on a contemporary operating system. Thank you, but WHY?

I think it just goes to show that, as technology evolves, so do our expectations of it. I was six and loved this game, my dad was thirty-six and loved it too. We still reference it with much fondness. Now I’m making fun of it. Having fought dinosaurs in the gorgeously-rendered Final Fantasy XII, seeing them move in real time with fancy things like a shadow and music and sound effects and individually moving body parts, this old game seems like something a six-year-old should be making, not playing. It makes me wonder where we go from “gorgeously-rendered” with all the fancy new trappings.

It also makes me wonder at the huge amount of mostly-useless stuff archived on the internet. Who would bother making this available twelve years after it was a good game? And why? I suppose it supports the concept of this (for me) newly-discovered “abandonia.com.” Abandoned games for the people who like them, and advertising for people with that target audience. I guess that’s me then…

Excuse me as I go try to make this tiny speck of nineties run on my machine.

Dinosaur Safari

Welcome to the Cladagram Room.

Laria’s techno-bio

Well, there’s not much to say here. Technology and I have met, say hi when we pass each other in the halls, and share a few laughs once in a while. I can use plenty of technology as a basic consumer; I’m clearly on a computer right now, but I don’t know how any of it works and I’m probably the poster-child for user error. I can’t even figure out where to upload my shiny new Facebook badge to that… place, with… the other badges… yeah. I’m probably the vaccine to viral media simply because I can’t find my way around. But I’m hoping that will change.

I use the basics like my cell phone, ipod, email, facebook (who am I kidding, I never check that thing), forums, DeviantArt, Fanfiction.net, digital cameras, eBay, and TextTwist. I can use wikipedia but I’ve never edited a wiki before this class. I don’t even comment on blogs. I play some video games, but only the ones where you can trade monumental amounts of time for skill. I haven’t played video games since my last bouts of Riven, Oregon Trail II, and Starcraft. I use YouTube, but mostly only what other people show me first. I can program a VCR, but that skill seems so obsolete now. I only hope I can survive this class.

Oh yeah, I run Windows and will be running Internet Explorer until I finish posting because I’ll probably mess it up and lose my browsing capability when I do it. Mac illiteracy hurts more than I expected at Midd.

Uploading to Dubai

So as I am sitting here trying thinking about my reading response to McLuhan’s article, about how print media is becoming “obsolete”, I can’t help but think about my experiences over this past seven or so months. Starting this past July I started working for Boat International, a media group that publishes various magazines, books and other supplements for the superyacht industry. For months I worked laboriously on editing and designing features for their monthly magazine (Boat International USA) and for their pièce de résistance – the annual Megayachts book. What amazed me the most from this experience was how integrated electronic media had been in the creation of these pieces of print media. The two were interdependent upon each other. Every day articles and photographs were uploaded to the server from writers and photographers who were aboard yachts in the middle of the ocean. Hourly emails were exchanged between the various other Boat International offices. And finally, when all was said and done, the features were uploaded directly to the printer in Dubai. Without the use of electronic media, the Boat International USA magazine or the perfect coffee table book Megayachts would not have been possible.

Trend-spotting… searching for cool

Almost every day, I have my daily dose of the internet. This usually consists of social networking, email, news, and checking various websites pertaining to the newest things in popular and underground culture.  Since I’m not one for finance or ‘politics-only’ news sources, my favorite site to visit is the New York Magazine website, where I can read stories from emerging artists, to fashion designer experiences, to valid latest-celebrity news, and even to enjoyable political stories, etc.

Another site I frequently check is called Cool Hunting. On this site, I always find links to other places where I can learn a whole new area of expertise in searching for “cool.”  New methods of art and stories behind them can be found here, as well as new products arising from secret underground companies.

Aside from the websites previously stated, I also surf through websites that contain the digital form of magazines, just like nymag.com.  Underground hip-hop magazines and sneaker magazines are my usuals, but anything new that I can find will most certainly join my list of daily dosage…

doing homework

As I’m trying to do this blogging assignment, I am also trying to get in touch with a friend to go over our econ problem set. One of us is having terrible reception right now, and we have called each other 8 times back and forth. I can’t hear anything that he is saying, just static. I am willing to show the class my cell phone call log to prove that literally we called each other 8 times. How did people do homework 15 year ago?!? I think I’m going to write him an email, you know, the content is going to be the same, I’m just changing the medium. Or maybe I’ll IM him.

What is the difference between checking a problem set in different mediums? I’ll pick the four I would most likely deal with: 1) face to face talking; 2) cell phone; 3) IMing; 4) email.

1) When you face to face, this is classic interaction and it seems pretty straight forward. When I’m checking answers or working in a group, my main concern is to be clear and understood. In person it is very easy because we can show people how to do something if they can’t do it, and we can talk to each other, which allows us to articulate our ideas about as fast as we think them up.
2) Cell phone. Update, I just finished checking the problem set over a cell phone (his reception cleared up). While it is nice to have the instantaneous responses of conversation, I found it very laborious to try to explain a math question. I could tell my partner was also a little annoyed when I told him how to physically write out the equation (my tone suggested he did not understand simple division). If we were face to face, I would have just shown him what I wrote while I explained it to him
3) If I IM someone about homework, I hate the lag time between question and response. I’m sure we’ve all had the conversations when you are answering a question, but they type another question before you finish. There is an interrupted flow of dialogue because typing takes that much longer than saying. And if you don’t believe me, try to type an equation in AIM at the same speed you could just tell someone. I think talking is much faster.
4) Email was going to be my last resort if the cell phone reception problem didn’t resolve itself. Email is like trading monologues–it is great if you are trying to catch your parents up on a week of college and don’t feel like talking to them, but it is terrible for explaining complete homework because there are no fluid responses. While you can reply to emails, it is not the same as having a conversation or even IM conversations.
So in conclusion, if you’re going to do homework with me, let’s meet in person. Feel free to comment.

Three Reasons Why People Who Hate Facebook Should GET OVER IT

Okay, so I read the article posted on the site, Three Reasons to Hate Facebookand I gotta say, I’m just tired of people whining about Facebook. I’ll agree that the addition of new vocabulary to our everyday speech because of Facebook (“Dude, I poked your girlfriend last night.””That’s a profile pic!””Did you see what I wrote on your graffiti wall?”) is slightly worrisome, but I mean really, it’s just a fad.

Remember back in the day when everyone had a LiveJournal? And your friends would get into fights over something one said about the other in a public entry? And now nobody cares at all? I feel like Facebook is heading in that same direction, especially with the addition of the applications deal. That is probably the one thing that Miss Annalee Newitz and I agree on. But even though applications are annoying, it probably takes about three seconds for me to delete all my requests. Plus, you can hide all those requests anyway.

The fact that one of Newitz’s arguments against Facebook was hinged on her own laziness ASTOUNDS me. She said herself that there are indeed plenty of privacy options that can be used on Facebook to keep all the people she’s slept with from seeing each other, but she’s just too lazy to figure them all out. And then the whole “social conformity” thing? PLEASE! Are we in middle school? Is putting your name in a phone book “conformist”? No. Facebook is practically the same thing. Newitz was upset because her employer was evidently using Facebook as a means of connecting all of their employees in a clean, clear, easy-to-use manner. Oh no! My life has been made easier because of Facebook! Give me a break.

So here’s the three reasons why people who hate Facebook should get over it:

1. It’s a voluntary site; if you hate it, then DON’T USE IT.

2. Privacy options are there for the people who are smart enough to use them. If you’ve got stuff you don’t want other people to see, then get off your lazy butt and hide it.

3. The “conformity” of the site actually makes it a lot easier to use; MySpace’s biggest problem is people covering their pages with useless graphics and crap that slow down your browsing speed. Conformity is not necessarily a bad thing.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Blu Ray vs HD DVD: VHS vs Beta repeated?

So this is the big piece of news this week as most of you probably know. HD DVD has essentially been buried in the ground by retailers, and by itself as well. I myself am happy that HD DVD lost the battle, if only because I already own a Blu Ray, and it make the format a lot more accessible to me. This will especially be the case when prices begin to drop on the actual movies themselves.

I remember when DVD first came out. My family received a DVD player as a gift from my uncle, with Gladiator on DVD. At this point, the machine was worthless if only because DVDs were so expensive in the early years. It was something ridiculous like 35-40 dollars for a single movie. Not worth it.

Right not Blu Ray is in that same position. But now that there is no longer an opposing format, it’s up to Sony to begin dropping prices. Look at HD Tv sets. Years ago a 32 inch High Def tv would run you back up to two thousand dollars. Now adays, a 32 inch tv will probably run you closer to seven hundred, and under. That said, Sony needs to pick up the pace now. Though I suppose things will really get started once previously “HD DVD ONLY” films start to pop up on Blu Ray.

Still, at least it’s over, and the consumer can finally get in on it without being scared of one format losing to another.

Links for class

Hi all – I’ve added a RSS Feed for links to websites that seem relevant to class on the sidebar. I’m running this through del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that I highly recommend. If you ever find a link that you want included on the site, you can send it to my del.icio.us account – username jajasoon. You can also browse the links I’ve accumulated. And if you’re a del.icio.us user, post your username in the comments to share the love.

“Format Wars” – Are Physical Formats Irrelevant?

So, HD-DVD “lost” the new HD format wars to Blu-Ray…check out this short article at Wired for more details and links:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/

It brings up an interesting question: with more and more of us watching video in completely digital formats, are physical manifestations of “content” relevant anymore? In the days of LPs, there was certainly a fetishistic quality about the records themselves, and part of the joy of “listening” to them came from an experience of ownership and organization (High Fidelity, anyone?). I know that I personally value having a binder of DVDs organized alphabetically by genre and title; many people make playlists in iTunes for similar reasons. As the article suggests, however, we seem to be entering an age when much of the media we consume is literally nothing more than trillions of bits of computer memory expressed as 1s and 0s, translated by software into audiovisual grammar we can understand. The one aspect of media consumption that this transformation seems to be affecting is the notion of ownership; to what extent does our ownership of a copy of a song, movie, video game, or television show factor into our reading of it? Has “ownership” become a quaint notion of a bygone system of cultural expression, if anyone can edit and redistribute content at will?

It seems to me that a shift to all-digital media content is in one sense simply the addition of another layer of abstraction; the content of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, for example, is essentially the same whether we listen to it on a CD or an mp3. As McLuhan would point out, however, the practices that surround our listening of the 5th symphony have radically changed. Whereas before we might peruse our collection of records or CDs and find that we were in the mood for Beethoven’s fifth, now (in iTunes, for example) we must specifically seek out the fifth symphony from our 58 days and 30 GB of music. Whenever I have a vague idea about the kind of music I’d like to listen to, I find myself simply hitting “shuffle” in iTunes and stopping on whatever song that pops up that I feel like hearing…there’s simply too much music in my library for me to realistically “browse” it all in any reasonable time. While I “own” all of the songs and albums in my library, I don’t own them in quite the same way I own my DVDs. I expect that something similar will happen to movies and TV shows in the next few years.

There is absolutely no reason why this should be funny.

There really isn’t any reason why this should be funny.
TEE RECK IZ BLOO!! BLOO!!! HAHAHA!
moar humorous pics

Nonetheless, I find it hilarious and laugh every time I see it. Is the cat a mad scientist? Are the cat and the Tee Recks confined together in an asylum for the mentally unbalanced? I don’t have a clue. What’s beautiful, however, is this:
There Will Be Bloo

Ticket stub from the (truly great) film There Will Be Blood, only our friends at the theater managed to make it Bloo. This delights me and maybe one other person, and if it delights any more of you, we might have a proper meme-birth on our hands. Nifty.

Reading response for 2/19

This week’s readings provide a glimpse into the “media ecology” tradition and its most well-known theorist, Marshall McLuhan.  McLuhan and media ecology emerged in response to the rise of television in the 1960s – what aspects of this approach are helpful in understanding today’s digital media? Are there particular limitations to this approach that strike you, either conceptually or in relation to today’s media environments?

Jason’s techno-bio

I’m a child of the 1970s, so I remember the rise of the personal computer quite distinctly – as a kid, I messed around with learning Basic, using TRS-80s, and playing Zork on my neighbor’s computer via modem on a Vax mainframe – in those days, modems were a device that you literally nested the telephone receiver into, not wired into the phone line! In 1985, I was in high school and our family got a “Fat Mac” – 512k of ram, dual floppy disc, no hard drive, pure state-of-the-art! I’ve been a diehard Mac owner ever since, which I think has really shaped my use of computers – I’m a savvy end-user, but know next-to-nothing about coding, command lines, and hackery.

Although I’m on my computer all-the-time, the technology that is more defining of my identity is television, as it’s the object of my main scholarly interest and personal fandom. Since I’ve become a media scholar, I’ve seen television shift distinctly at the levels of content (the rise of genres like reality TV), grammar (the emergence of complex long-form narratives like Lost or 24), and medium (HDTV, DVRs, console games with online access). For a more detailed reflection on how DVRs and TiVo relate to my use of television, some of you might be interested in “TiVoing Childhood,” an essay I wrote a couple years ago about raising kids in a TiVo household.

Joe’s Techno-biography

I graduated a Music Major with a Minor in Applied Mathematics, which translated means I switched majors and wanted two years of Electrical Engineering to count for something. In my final year of college I discovered IRC and Pine-mail, which allowed me to communicate with other students I had met on the road while traveling with my a cappella group without a ridiculous phone bill or stamps.

Before leaving college I bought my first computer, a Macintosh G3 tower with a 3GB hard drive, and started building a cappella websites. I would spend hours a day, browsing sites and communicating with people from around the world who shared my passion. Email and newsgroups were my primary forms of communication. I stated working with php and MySQL,, while venturing into digital video editing, translating what I could do with sound wave forms into manipulating frames.

Over the past year, I have taken a special interest in virtual worlds, and specifically SecondLife. It’s my intersection of video, audio, animation, im and voice chat. I’ve even started an a cappella group, made up of members from three continents.

Twelve years and 90+ technologies later, I get to teach other people how to use rich media applications and social software at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. This helps, as my wife’s family owns an apple orchard and farm market about one hour north of here. Quite literally, our roots are here.

Change your environment

We mentioned that the blogging platform we are using is WordPress MU, the same application that runs WordPress.com. It is a flexible system that seems to have a better learning curve than most blogging platforms.

One of the advantages is that we can change the look and feel of a blog in real time by applying a theme. The theme defines the layout of the page (2 or 3 columns, full or fixed width), font types and colors. Some even come with background images. Content, like text and embedded videos stay the same, what changes is how they are displayed.

The limited number of themes available in our version of WordPress were pulled from a list, where people have created thousands of custom themes. Here are two lists that I use:

http://themes.wordpress.net/
http://www.wpthemesfree.com/

Jason and I are not fond of the theme we are currently using and we want you to choose a new one. The only criteria is that it must be 2-column, widget ready, and display sub-pages. Check out these lists, or others, and let us know your favorites by commenting to this post. In fact, I’ll take the top 10 choices and make them available to everyone who makes a blog with our WordPress.

Slate Video – Hillary’s Inner Tracy Flick

Hi everyone,

Here’s a link to a video at slate.com that I think ties in pretty well with the course. It’s essentially a mashup of a speech by Senator Hillary Clinton and the film Election (starring Reese Witherspoon). I’m not sure if I can embed it directly, so just follow the link for now I guess. There’s a quick ad at the beginning, and the video starts directly after that.

Hillary’s Inner Tracy Flick

Reading Response – Derek

It would seem that a real-life implementation of Jenkins’s comments on literacy depends on an interpretation of media that incorporates all three of Meyrowitz’s levels; examining any one of these levels in a vacuum opens up criticisms, some more valid than others, to media as a tool of social education and participation. For example, Jenkins’s media literacy “skill” of play, which he defines as “the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving (24),” necessitates a definition of media similar to Meyrowitz’s “Media as environment” level, since the context in which one plays is quite important if the goal is to encourage participation (as shown, a teenager might become engaged with ancient Rome much more readily through a computer game than through written text). However, the expression that comes with the experimenting of play requires some sort of coherent grammar that the “player” can understand. Without this grammar, there might simply be too much abstraction for the average person to be able to, again, enjoy participating in it. The grammar of a computer game like Civilization–the layout of a world map, the sounds and animations associated with in-game game units, and the expressive meaning of building a city–is infinitely more interesting and engaging than an abstract reading of the game’s source code. If we were simply to think of a computer game in the context of Meyrowitz’s level of the conduit–the level that most people see first and never see past–we would be severely restricted in terms of how we thought of the game and of “play” as a skill. Because the discourse of “education” does not operate in most computer games at the level of the conduit, they are often dismissed as mindless diversions. (When I was a child, my mother always made me play a “learning game” like Reader Rabbit or Outnumbered before I could play Monkey Island…yet the grammar, the particular form of Monkey Island was much more engaging (the player has to solve logic puzzles in a kind of narrative form) than simply solving math or vocabulary problems in a designated period, as most of the educational games of the early and mid-90s did. This is not to denigrate those games–I enjoyed playing them, if not as much as Monkey Island–but to speculate on how the levels of grammar and environment can drastically enhance their participatory power.

Presidential Platforms

This New York Times Article compares Obama to Hillary using a Mac vs. PC analogy. It also mentions Obama’ s use of blogs and social networking sites. Apparently Obama is also proposing to “make all public government data available to everybody to use as they wish.”

What do you guys think?

Reading response Brian

I enjoyed reading the section in Meyrowitz’s article about grammar (language) of media because it brought up some points about how the structure and syntax of the medium sometimes help our collective understanding of the medium. There are conventions that we as a society (or consumer) expect from those who create medium. For example, when watching a movie, we expect that if a character looks off to the side, the next shot should be what he is looking at so we the audience can see it too. These little “rules” have been established and reinforced over decades—we expect movie makers to follow them to avoid confusing us.
Jenkins writes about the way students learn, specifically talking about how they interact when playing certain types of games. Those who play games regularly will find loopholes that they can exploit, and once they become familiar with the structure of how the game is designed, they can take advantage of these rules. Sometimes this is called strategy, but if you are playing against the computer and you continually employ the same tricks because you know the game cannot stop you, I think you have broken the structure of the game—the programmer has followed a specific convention and you are going against it.
For example, I have been playing the football video game Madden for several years, across all types of systems, although I started on computer back in high school. I have learned that the best way to complete a pass is to put your best wide receiver in the third receiver’s spot and just wait for a linebacker to guard him. For those that are not as familiar with football, basically I am putting a fast player in position to exploit a slower defender. The game typically does not make the appropriate adjustments because it will put its best defenders where my best receiver should line up (the number one spot) but since I have my best guy in the third spot, I score lots of touchdowns. I feel like I have gone against the structure and “rules” of the game because this really would not happen in real life—and if it did, a human coach would make an adjustment.