Snap Z and Audacity are two very powerful programs that I want to continue to understand better. It appears that they are great for copying copyrighted material for yourself. I’m sure that’s what distributors argue goes on at colleges, but it is an amazing luxury to be able to make my own mp3s from streaming audio.
While this will help me enjoy video and music from online sources, I do believe that there are lots of ways these programs can help traditional forms of media. For a different film class, we were encouraged to use Snap Z to show stills from the movies or scenes we were writing about. Not only did having a picture there make it easier for the reader, it kept the author honest because we were no longer able to fudge details about a movie that may have not been there. When there is physical evidence on the subject you are discussing, it allows you to write more precisely and descriptively than not having the screen cap there.
Category: Uncategorized
Perez Hilton
When I get back to my room from class, practice, or wherever, I typically plop down on my desk and log onto my Middlebury webmail account, see if I have any urgent messages or new facebook messages. Then I procrastinate for about twenty minutes and check out my friends facebook updates. My next step is always to check Perez Hilton. I am really ashamed to admit this, but there is something about the site that makes it so easy to access celebrity gossip and scan through the site, picking and choosing which headlines might appeal to me. It’s much easier than actually purchasing People Magazine, Us Weekly, In Touch, etc. and you don’t have to waste your time skipping over the advertisements. It is a crazy site because Perez updates the information every 30 minutes or so. Each time I get back to my room, there is something new to learn about celebs. I don’t recommend getting started..it can get addictive!
Film Your Issue
In its 4th year, FYI – Film Your Issue (www.filmyourissue.com ) has grown into a global internet-based competition inviting more than 25 million high school and college students in the U.S. alone to engage in pressing contemporary issues by creating and uploading two-minute short films on issues that impact their generation. In addition to taking the pulse of young adults on issues, FYI – Film Your Issue encourages young people to add their voices to the public dialogue, and underscores how even an individual voice can influence public debate.
Beginning Feb. 15, films can be uploaded on multiple participating platforms including MTV, YouTube and AFI Screen Nation, as well as promoted on MySpace TV, after registering on www.filmyourissue.com. Select entries will be highlighted on MySpace TV and distributed by The Associated Press to its 1,800 Online Video Network media outlets. The submission deadline is April 14, 2008.
“The internet has become one of the most potent platforms of social change , social activism and raising consciousness — and with the rapidly evolving technology which puts filmmaking capabilities into the hands of young people, this competition brings those elements – the internet, social activism and “User-generated-content” — together dynamically,” says HeathCliff Rothman, founder and president of FYI – FILM YOUR ISSUE. “We are excited as we begin the 4th round that this unprecedented consortium of organizations has joined with us to encourage the next generation of leaders, and provide a global platform for pressing social issues.”
Winners are selected by an illustrious VIP Jury, by the public online, and by participating cause organizations. Prizes to eleven winning films include internships at USA TODAY, The United Nations, P.O.V. and The Humane Society and a $5000 college scholarship from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Strong American Schools, and a filmmaker VIP Pass and presentation at SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival. Winning films or excerpts will also be broadcast on Starz, and a selection presented at the annual NAACP Conference. The MTV audience favorite will be featured on Think, MTV’s multi-media community focused on youth activism, and the winning filmmaker profiled on MTV News. In
addition, FYI presents two additional annual awards: The Walter Cronkite Civic Engagement Leadership Award to an academic institution, and The Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award, to an individual.
FYI 2008’s VIP Jury is headed by legendary news anchors and authors Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw, and includes MySpace Founder Tom Anderson, MTV President Christina Norman, CNN Anchor Wolf Blitzer, NBC Anchor Brian Williams, United Nations DPI Under-Secretary-General Kiyotaka Akasaka, Best Buy Vice-Chairman Brad Anderson, HBO Host Bill Maher, USA TODAY Publisher Craig Moon, USA TODAY Founder Al Neuharth, Weinstein Company Co-founder Harvey Weinstein and others.
Past judges include George Clooney and Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Winners from past competitions have gone on to work in major Hollywood production companies, been invited to present their films on Capitol Hill, and one recently co-produced a film that was the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Award winner. Through the global reach of the internet and The United Nations Department of Public Information, entries from past rounds have come not only from the U.S., but from all points across the globe, including Iran, The Philippines, Brazil, Russia, Hong Kong, Israel, the U.K., Argentina and elsewhere.
Partners for the 2008 FYI competition are USA TODAY, The Associated Press, The United Nations, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MTV, MySpace, NAACP, The Humane Society of the United States, SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival and AFI Screen Nation, Natural Resources Defense Council, PBS’ award-winning documentary series P.O.V., Starz, The Human Rights Campaign, ASCAP and The International Documentary Association. Academic partners are The Association of American Colleges and Universities, The National Association of Student Councils, The American Association of University Professors and The University Film and Video Association.
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…
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Affinity Spaces: a growing list
We should create a list of the “Affinity Spaces” that we utilize.
I use DIGG, as well as The Hype Machine .
Digg is a fully democratized news site. Anyone can submit an article, picture, video or mp3. People browsing the site can “digg” a specific page and increase its popularity rating. Each page functions as a message board for a particular submission. Comments on each message board can also be dugg.
The hype-machine utilizes a web-crawling robot that trawls the Internet for the most popular music blogs. Every few hours, hypem adds music to its homepage based on these blogs’ most downloaded mp3s. All the music is streamed from hypem but the site provides links to all the blogs hosting the mp3 files. A huge amount of music on hypem is remixed by independent artists.
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