New Media

back logged blogs

2005-12-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

the following is a group of blogs that were created for MS149 and were never posted onlide due to technical issues:

IPod Video, and the potential for revolution

Since the announcement of the new video IPod on October 12th the apple stock has been turbulent but sales are strong. The impact of the product has not been fully felt by the public. The capabilities of this new media extent far further then just as a portable movie viewer for airplane flights. There is a feature that allows the image and sound to be played through a television. This feature allows the owner to travel with the IPod and share video with friends and family. This also means that the days of bringing one’s DVD collection with them are over. There is no longer a worry that a disk will get scratched or that you will leave it behind in the player. It also means that there are future capabilities for larger scale media piracy. It is possible to load over 100 feature films onto the new IPod. That it a lot of copyright infringement. I am looking forward to checking out the new technology and am greatly anticipating the coming months of sales as their stock hopefully rises higher.

TiVo the pirate of the T.V. cabinet

Since there was a VCR there have been people recording television for later enjoyment. With this comes many capabilities for the viewer to copy and reuse the footage. The viewer becomes in control of the content and this leads to the capabilities or redistribution and re-editing. As time and technology has progressed so have ways in which the viewer has taken control. With the creation of TiVo there has been a flux in the content and in the amount of digital media accessible to the home viewer. This leads to a flux in the amount of digitally pirated material that is available on the internet. This has only recently come to my attention when I was watching the downloaded television show, MTV’s Daria. As the show started I thought nothing of opening QuickTime and pressing space bar. But when it was tiem fo the first commercial break, instead of just having it fade back, I was greeted by the bopping sound of a TiVo. The illegal file had been acquired through a TiVo system. I think that this technology is being used for more then the intended use. It makes me happy that if it weren’t for this new technology then there would not be so much material available for the average consumer.

Eye TY is for ME

As a media studies Major my job as a student has been greatly eased by new technologies that are being unveiled and implemented. At the beginning of my sophomore year I decided that if I was going to be a successful media studies major and filmmaker then I would have to invest in a device that took a video signal and digitized it. I did the research and purchased an Eye TV system. This miraculous piece of technology has solved so many problems and has proved to be invaluable through my college career. Not only am I able to straight up copy DVD’s in real time, I am also able to take a television signal and convert my computer into an TiVo. I am able to create movies and copy’s of television shows that I can have on a disk a half hour after it airs. This has given me the ability to record the OC and a half hour later be able to watch it with 5 girls over at Scripps commercial free. Currently I have all of the episodes that have been aired for season two of LOST. And although I could download them from the apple store the next day, I take certain pride I being able to create my own copy’s and have them that night.

With a new month comes a new WIRED magazine and a new slew of questions and ideas. While flipping through the wired I came across the term WEBLOGISTAN. It is defined as: “The Iranian blogosphere, where activists go to vent anonymously in the face of Iran’s oppressive regime. Weblogistan is now so vast that Persian is the fourth most widely used language on the blogs.” This term is new and it leaves me with questions. In theory a person could be traces through their blog name and ISP. Although Blogs seem relatively anonymous, the government is still watching. If there is a person who the government might see as a dangerous radical who is posting in weblogistan that person might have to deal with real world repercussions if the government finds it necessary to investigate them.

Is a blog a Web-based application or a statistic file?

Nanotubes have been hinted at for a while and not until recently has this new technology come into available use. The practical applications of nanotubes are far to numerous to yet be seen. This technology is a glimps of the future and allows us to get one bit closer to the next step, the carbon age of buckytubes. What does this mean for new media, well imagine computers smaller faster, cheaper, more durable, screens and systems integrated so closely that the systems are entirely self contained and fully integrated, and that is just the beginning, Not only will computer technology continue to grow, there will be the availability of a new sources of material and power and this makes way for potential new media.

Blog on blogging:

This class was a pleasure attending. I have a new understanding of the digital world of the internet and have a better concept of what the internet is really capable of. When we were first assigned to keep a blog for the class, I was skeptical of the whole BLOG thing. As I read and listened to class discussion and attended lectures I began to gain a greater respect for the blog. As we progresses through the weeks I began to understand the purpose and after I attended a lecture on blogging that Professor Fitzpatrick held, I understood.
Before this class I had never visited a blog and never wanted to, but now that the class is over, I actively search for them for information. I was blog phobic but now I am blog friendly.

Come to Daddy

2005-11-14T12:58:00.000-08:00

After reading the section in “Connected” about the music video “Come To Daddy” by Aphex Twin I was compelled to see the music video. The video was like just as described in the reading. It was a satanic wasteland where all of the little children had the same face. The music video was more then just a miniature horror film, it is a disorienting and disconnected world where there is very little left that has not been incorporated by the drones. The last bit of innocence that is left is the elderly woman and her dog. The reading does not discuss the minute and ten seconds of silence in the beginning of the video. This beginning suspense is what leads to the furiousness of the video. The beginning is of equal importance to the end where the daemon is demanding the woman’s soul because it creates a tension that the ending stretches and tightens.

The Cybracero program

2005-11-09T14:19:00.000-08:00

While reading, THE VIRTUAL BARRIO @ THE OTHER FRONTIER by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, I was reminded of an artist, Alex Rivera, who came into a media studies class last semester ( Media and Migration, taught by Jessie Learner) and talked with us about his cyber-art. Through his art he comments of border issues between the U.S. and Mexico and he deals with the immigration problems with his ideas of the Cybracero program. Like in our reading he is trying to “find innovative grassroots applications to new technologies and link all community centers through the net.” He has set up a fake web-site devoted to the program in which only the labor is imported to the United States. The workers themselves are left at home in Mexico, as they Tele-commute to American farms over the high-speed Internet. On the website there is a five minute movie devoted to the explanation of the Cybrecero program. This type of new media and new internet concepts serve as an example of a context that is being shown of the new push for Mexican and Chicano digital art.

For more information or to understand what I am trying to say please visit:

www.cybracero.com

Virtual Africans and the Technology of Empowerment

2005-11-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

On Thursday I went to a lecture entitled “Virtual Africans and the Technology of Empowerment” it was given by Chika Anyanwu and during the talk he discussed the fact that he wanted to create a digital database that would encompass all the information and story’s about the African people. Working with the Labyrinth group and with the Annenberg school of communication, he wants to develop a database that is accessible by all people from their own home systems and who’s information is controlled by the African people themselves. The information will be extrapolated from existing databases search engines and African related websites. He suggested that people would navigate the sight by constructing databodies or profiles for the transfer and sharing of information.
By doing this he hopes to achieve some sort of a hold in the Internet for the African People and Nation. He spoke on the fact that the white man rules the Internet and through the colonialism of technology through the Internet. He said that in Africa has accepted the idea of foreign ideologies. Media, literature, educational techniques, even a shift away from old languages and levitation towards English. He wants to capture a history of Africa because the memory of Africa continues to change because the society continues to shift. He wishes to be free from colonialism but because of the oppressive white and English nature of the internet, he still feels that the African nation is still chained.
One part I didn’t understand was when he talked about idea that there is now a new digitized virtual Diaspora who were the new age aliens.

Database Media, So What!

2005-11-02T13:54:00.000-08:00

I believe that I have discovered a use for the idea of a database of media. Not only does it help in the creation of a soft cinema with the computer generated narrative form it is also a database for filmmakers to acquire footage. This year I am enrolled in two separate media production courses, Advanced Editing, and Documentary Fact and Fiction. For each class I have needed to create a film composed of found footage. In each class I was not allowed to use mainstream Hollywood movies or television shows for material I was forced to rely on the Internet for the bulk of my material. This is when I came across the Prelinger archives. The archive “contains approximately 1 petabyte of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.” The files and movies that I was able to access and download proved to be extremely useful for both of my classes.
This site mission and goal is intended to help collect, compile and preserve artifacts of our culture, which are reflections of our heritage. “Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.”

http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Special effects are cool

2005-10-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I attended a lecture in the Technology In Entertainment series. It was a Lecture by David Hardberger who is a modern day special effects artist who works in real special effects as well as digital. His lecture was based around the idea that even though we are using Computer Generated Graphics in most movies to get shots that we would not normally obtain, that there is still room on the movie set for old fashion special effects. He emphasized the fact that computer effects are getting better and better and the rendering times are getting shorter but also that there is still a need for a practical special effects artist in many of today’s big films, such as “Lord of The Rings”, and “Star Wars.” He specialized in miniature destructions. When there is a movie where there needed to be massive destruction, such as “Dante’s Peak” he is called in to supervise and assist. According to him, the fact that digital effects area becoming so widely used is a good thing and that the popularity is still growing and that the potentials still have not been fully tapped. He is glad that the computer is taking many of the long tedious hours out of set building. While at the same time, the new digital wave is leaving havoc behind with countless jobs being lost to efficiency. There is now only room in Hollywood for a handful of key special effects supervisors and although every once and a while there is still a major motion picture that is heavily reliant on models, most are moving away from the real and getting into the digital.

I asked David afterwards if he had any tips for special effects with fire and he said that if I liked fire that I should try rubber cement and that create a great fuse and it burns quickly.

iTunes + Quicktime = The Dynamic Vi-Duo

2005-10-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

As we continue to push forward in the fields of music and entertainment technology, new fields are being created and new markets are forming around products. Recently the good people at Apple have released a new version of their popular music application, iTunes 6.0. In this new version they have begun to integrate video into the application so that a movie may be accessed and displayed just like any song in your Library. With the new version of Quicktime 7.0.3 Pro, the user now has the opportunity to export movies through quick time and mount them into the iTunes application. On the website, www.apple.com, it says, “Watch iTunes do for video what it did for music. Now that the iTunes Music Store offers more than 2,000 music videos and select TV shows along with 2 million songs (and counting),” This is a large step for the intermingling of different mediums of media technology. We are at the cusp of an era of digitalization, and what we choose to digitize and mediate and how we go about doing it is important. For my generation there have always been music videos and it was just a matter of time before they became fully digitally integrated. The music is there and now we are just beginning to see what can come out of the personal video integration.

www.apple.com
www.quicktime.com

The internet has ALLREADY taken controll

2005-10-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

This Blog is in response to the blog of (amers' media theory 149 blog) entitled “Democratizing effect? Or Dependency?” in the last paragraph the author brings up and interesting point from Aarseth, “the political connotations of the word user are conveniently ambivalent, suggesting both active participating and dependency, a figure under the influence of some kind of pleasure-giving system” (174). The blogger goes on to state generally accepted truths about the amount in which we have come to rely on technology for our basic existence and way of life. The author ends the post with the idea that computers and technologies such as cell phones give us such great communication that when we are in a situation where the technology is not available that we feel helpless and vulnerable. I personally agree with this idea and feelings.
This past summer, my girlfriend and I were living in our first apartment together in San Francisco. When we moved in the first week nothing was set up. No internet no television, we had nothing but each other and one hell of a view. I thought that we would be fine and that we could wait a few weeks, I soon found out that my girlfriend can’t live without the internet. For a few hours I thought that we could live without the internet for the summer but after the first night I found myself waking up, calling the internet installing company and buying a wireless router all before noon on our second day in the apartment. It took a week for Comcast to come and set up the internet but once it did I noticed a vast shift in her attitude and my own.
I learned that I had become a slave to the technology and that without it, I felt naked and was rendered helpless. In this generation more then any before us I feel that we are particularly dependent on the interned because we have been brought up with it and have had it be a central part of most of our lives.

Googleing through Blogs

2005-10-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

I am not a blog reader, I have never been interested in blogs nor did I ever read one before this class but, while surfing on the Internet late Sunday night I inadvertently came across my first usefull blog. I was searching on Google and a link led me to the blog of Lee Goldberg. As the page loaded I did not realize that I was viewing a blog. All I saw was text in the middle of the screen and I started to read. To me it looked just like a web page but after 5 minutes of reading, it dawned on me that this was not a typical website and that it was in reality just a slick looking blog for a L.A. movie producer. Seeing as I was Googleing how to write us a script treatment for a documentary film, it seems appropriate that I came across his blog. This was the first time that I realized that blogs are more then just high traffic areas where people traverse in their pursuit of information or entertainment. A blog is a place where I could actually find knowledge applicable for a class. I found a site that provided me with essential information that I could not find anywhere else on the web. The layout and graphics of the page led me to believe that it was a standard web page, it was not until I started to scroll that I hit the section with questions and answers. Half way through the site there was a section where readers addressed their questions to Lee and this to me was an indication that this was no standard web page and that this was in fact a blog. I should have also been thrown off by the picture of him at the top of the page but because the picture is a little goofy / dorky, I believed that it may have just be humorous filler at the top of the page.

Here is the blog (don’t waste your time by going to it) it really is not worth your time.

http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2004/11/how_do_i_write_.html

The Story of my Afternoon

2005-10-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

When running and viewing the application “Afternoon, a story” I was confused by the way in which it was presented to the viewer. I had difficulty comprehending the general story and I felt that this was a direct correlation to how the media was presented to me. Because I felt that at times the pages seemed to appear randomly I began to lose interest and my frustration level grew. The main problem for me was that I did not know how much more text I had left to read. When I thought that I was reaching the end, it just kept going and repeating itself. The story for me ended when I quit the application. I feel that ever if I were to see this story in a published book form I would still probably not get it.

The Blogging Future

2005-10-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

The Gender Bender
October 3, 2005

After recently attending an expert lecture on Blogging, I have come to realize that bogs are just another facet of entertainment and another way to transfer information. A blog is nothing more then a public forum to post ideas, concepts, and entertaining stories. I learned that all blogs are not just people posting fore themselves; blogs are high traffic areas where people traverse in their pursuit of information or entertainment. A blog is more then just a posting forum it is a place where people are able to freely share and swap idea while at the same time they can’t ignore the fact that it serves as entertainment.
I have never thought that a blog could take on the role of a daily. People post on their blogs daily to update the world as to what is going in the lives of their characters. Many people may be true to their blogs but there are vast numbers of bloggers who blur the line between fact and fiction. Recently in our latest reading we discussed the idea of internet text as being fleeting and obsolete as soon as it is written. But we also discussed how books are looked at as eternal and forever which makes it interesting when peoples blogs are converted from dailies on the internet into a large bound book. This brings up problems because once the book is created and the blogs are chosen, there is no way to add onto the blog book. I feel that the idea of the blog prevents it from making a good book because there will always be more to add. I feel that there will be future problems when more people have their blogs published.

Alice in the garden of forking paths

2005-09-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

The reading on the story of “The Garden of Forking Paths” is in example of how “many of new media’s important ideas and influences first appeared in unexpected contexts.” In it, the concept of choices is discussed in a manner that seemed somewhat reminiscent to the idea of web page surfing and the idea of peering into the looking glass like in Alice in Wonderland. In the reading the reader is presented with the idea of being able to make choices and having unlimited options and paths to follow. There is also the idea that down the path there is an unknown and this reminds me of Alice in Wonderland with the idea of going on a journey down a path that is provided but not knowing which direction to go or how to follow it. This is the same process that occurs when one goes to surf the Internet. When I log online I am presented with unlimited options of where to go and what to do, I am guided with banners and popups but the paths are presented to me and I can only choose one path to follow at a time.

A part of the reading that I have not fully grasped it the idea that all of the paths intersect and converge yet each path is it’s own separate journey. It is because the paths overlap in places like a choose-your-own-adventure story?

How infomercials have shaped my life

2005-09-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

Ever since I can remember I have always loved to watch television and as a natural part of the television watching process I have come across many infomercials that have changed the way that I live my life and the have shaped the way that I think. Now don’t get me wrong I know that television does not control me but I should give certain credit where it is due. I feel that if it were not for infomercials I would not have my odd assortment of hobbies. If I had not watched television at odd times of the early mornings, I would not fence, flower arrange, play badminton, scuba dive or even have an interest in robotics. If it were not for the verbal crafting of Ron Popeil and his lovely assistant Shirley I might never have known the joys of a personal juicer. In the resent Mcluhan readings there is a brief mention of the infomercial and their obvious consumer appeal. I feel that although they are typically seen as cheesy and obvious selling commercials, they have gotten better and craftier. Commercials and infomercials have also been a cornerstone of the television industry since it’s birth and are an integral part of the medium of television.

WHY I LOVE MY MAC

2005-09-14T01:41:00.000-07:00

When discussing the idea of an oral culture, I was forced to self reflect as to how I learn and how I interact with society. I am a very auditory learner and if I see something or read it, it is not as effective as if someone had told me the information. I am able to grasp on to it better when I hear it and if I do read it, it takes at least three times until I actually “get it.” When I was 10, i was diagnosed with Dyslexia and have been combating it ever since. I have the dyslexia coupled with a graphomotor problem where my brain and hands do not go at the same speed and many times by the time information has goes from my brain to my hand, I am on to my next idea and the previous one is forgotten. If I speak my mind, and dictate my thoughts on a paper I am much more successful in following my thought process and creating logical arguments.
These readings have presented me with a new way of looking at an oral culture. I have always chosen to live mostly in an oral culture due to my dyslexia and as little as possible do I dive into a literate culture but unfortunately because of the highly literate academic facility that we are in, there are many instances where I am forced into a class setting that I would find not the most ideal. I have learned to cope with the academic environment by integrating myself with technology and using the latest tools at my disposal. A laptop is more useful to me then a pencil and paper.
I type everything and anything that is ever hand written is usually re-written by another person for their own clarification. This reading made me thing about the fact that I am using a literary technology as my main medium for communication between academics (my professors) and myself. I reconsider the manner in which I take notes, I have tried different strategies for note taking in class. For a year I carried a tape recorder to every class and with it a library of blank cassettes, after school I would listen to the recordings from the days teachings and found that this was rather helpful but extremely time consuming, and if I didn’t give the tape my complete focus I would tend to wander away from that way of learning. The laptop works for me because it allows me to spatially organize my thought and it is created for easy correction.

Star Wars

2005-09-07T14:10:00.000-07:00

This Blog is in response to the conversation that we were having in class on Monday the 5th where we discussed the use of Computer generated effects in Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith. Nick was commenting that Lucas was using to many special effects and that Lucas could have used real actors to play the role of the Clone army. Although I agree that in the latest movie there is an overabundance of special computer generated effects, I do believe that Lucas had a very clear vision as to why he chose to use CG models as the clone army forces. Nearly all of the characters that were a representation of the dark side or that were associated with the Empire, were presented to the viewer with having some computer simulated elements that in no way were linked to inanimate forms. The dark side and Empirical forces being computer generated or not can be considered to create continuity for the dark side. Perhaps in doing this, Lucas is searching for a greater ability for immediacy; viewers become so used to the CG theme as a representation of the dark side that by the end of the movie, viewers fail to notice that the dark side characters are CG. The viewer stops looking at the computer generated image and instead are more focused on the characters themselves.

My first post

2005-09-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

this is a test post