new media writing reflection

i chose to work with audio, since my experience editing audio is limited.

i used audacity a few times at my former job to create the soundtrack to audio slideshows, which were always simple edits with only one or two clips. for the class assignment, i wanted to do something a little more sophisticated.

my process was:
1. listen to clips provided
2. listen to clips provided again because i forgot what they sounded like
3. listen to a few clips another time, this time logging what i heard
4. finally upload some clips into audacity

from there, i didn't really have much of a vision. i love badly drawn boy, so that was an easy choice, and i settled on a few parts of shaun's recordings that i liked. the next task was how to compose it all. i don't believe there is a formula for this type of thing, we all work in our own ways. it was at this point that i began thinking "ehh ... maybe i'll just do a video." but i'm not here to relearn how to do something i am already familiar with.

the visualizations of the soundwaves are helpful in audio editing, so that you can find clean breaks. i was disappointed, however, that i couldn't figure out how to lower the decibels for just a section of a clip. i also wished that there was a pinning function. but these are things you must learn to live without when using free software.

i can't figure out how to upload the audio file here on blogger and i am amazed that they don't have that capability. i will do research this week and get it up here.

Book report: The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein

In his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future* *Or, Dont Trust Anyone Under 30, Mark Bauerlein lays the case that American Millennials, people born between 1980 and 2000, pose a great threat to democracy and the future of the country in general. He blames disinterest in high culture, rejection of traditions and previously unknown levels of narcissism. These factors, he blames on the digital age in which the Millennials have grown up.

Reading this book was a challenge. It wasn't because the language was too heady or the subject matter too nebulous. It's because I was on the defensive. Bauerlein attacks me personally in this book and I can't help but have my shield up. He asserts that my generation is dumb. We have no taste for the finer things. We are all low-brow technophiles who are more interested in what our peers are tweeting about than the topic of next week's CAPS meeting. We can't read, can't write, and we have no interest in improving our skills. I approached this book wanting to disagree with Bauerlein. In the end, though, I see his point.

There were certain parts when I felt he was pointing directly at me and criticizing ("... the thrill of composing something about yourself, posting it online, having someone, somewhere read it and write something back. That's the pull of immaturity ...") my digital habits. And there were parts when I felt he was placing all the blame on adolescents, paying little heed to the fact that millennials were born into a digital society and don't know any other way.

The first two chapters, Knowledge Deficits and The New Bibliophobes, were statistics-heavy, which is always a tough situation for me to labor through. But I am glad that he included so many statistics because they help to support his argument. Stats on literacy rates, mathematical proficiency, and time spent reading/studying were shocking. Teens and undergraduates, according to the statistics, are spending more and more time on leisure, and less on scholarly pursuits. Millennials aren't reading many books, something Bauerlein calls a-literacy: "knowing how to read but choosing not to." Baurlein says "Today's rising generation thinks more highly of its lesser traits. It wears anti-intellectualism on its sleeve, pronouncing book-reading an old-fashioned custom, and it snaps at people who rebuke them for it." At the same time, I think about the mainstreamed "hipster" culture that exists. "Hipsters" are ridiculed by others as pretentious music snobs in skinny jeans and ironic t-shirts. In the world of the hipster, one's perceived intellect is just as important as the clothes they're wearing.

Another challenge in my reading was remembering that I may not be a typical example of a Millennial. My family encouraged reading. I did my homework in high school. I was active in sports and clubs in high school. I went to a liberal arts college in a very liberal upstate New York town. My friends and I have always embraced intellectual endeavors. Being smart has been cool for me. I suppose there are some people my age who don't have similar values, but I often assume everyone was raised to value knowledge.

Bauerlein is concerned that young people aren't taking advantage of opportunities to go see classical music performances and visit museums. A valid concern, true, but as he continued to write of his concern about Millennial disinterest in high culture, I couldn't help but think that he was missing the point. Kids aren't going to go to the opera on their own. They aren't going to pick up a James Joyce book if they don't see their parents and other influential elders doing the same. Throughout the reading I wondered why Bauerlein was letting the elders of the Millennials -- his generation -- get away with shirking their responsibilities as role models and influences on these young, malleable minds. And every time I would get really fed up and angry, he would swoop in and save himself: "Kids will be kids, and teens will be teens. Without any direction from the menu, they stick with what they know and like. They have no natural curiosity for the historical past and high art, and if no respected elder introduces them to Romanticism and the French Revolution, they'll rarely find such thing on their own."

When youth do find themselves immersed in art, Bauerlein find it reprehensible that they reject the notion of emulating a great master. He cites a student interviewed in a documentary about community art programs for at-risk youth. The young man says "...I see kids drawing and painting, everybody draws the exact same boring, traditional way trying to be Picasso or Rembrandt or whoever else, you know, and I'm just trying to be Carlo Lewis, you know, I don't really care, I don't want to be Rembrandt, you know, I'm a black guy from [words garbled], that's who I am." Bauerlein seems to interpret this as complete disrespect for the past and for tradition. He sees youth ignoring the great strides made by our forefathers that have brought us to the dizzying digital age we're in today, dismissing their work as irrelevant. I don't think that's really what Carlo Lewis was trying to say, though. Carlo Lewis wants to express himself in a unique way. He doesn't want his art to look like that of his peers, which looks like a poor regurgitation of another artist's work.

Bauerlein introduces the idea originally presented in a 2005 Time magazine article, a sub-generational group called "Twixters." According to Bauerlein, the following criteria define Twixters: ages 22 to 30; have college education; come from middle-class families; live in cities/large suburbs. And these are the typical lifestyle choices: taking service industry jobs after graduating college; moving back home or in with roommates after graduation; serial dating. Bauerlein writes: "It's all social, all peer-oriented. Twixters don't read, tour museums, travel, follow politics, or listen to any music but pop and rap, much less do something such as lay out a personal reading list or learn a foering language. Rather, they do what we expect an average 19 year-old to do. They meet for poker, buy stuff at the mall, and jump from job to job and bad to bed." Bauerlein sees the Twixters as immature, afraid of growing up and facing adulthood.

Essentially, Millennials are too busy updating social networking profiles and blogging the mundanity of suburban life to delve in the finer things: philosophy, robust political debate, historical texts, classical music, art history. This is probably true. I think that this book is more of a call for sweeping education reform than anything else. If educators can find compelling ways to present this higher culture and higher-level intellectual material, youth will engage themselves in it. At the same time, we can't expect pop culture to fall by the wayside. It is not the fault of the Millennials that they are living in an age of hypermedia and ego-centric diversions. You can't really prove to a disaffected 15 year-old how important it is to understand civics and history and what it will mean to him when he is of voting age. Adolescents are wrapped up in their own insecurities and social lives. It is hard for someone who has only been alive for a decade and a half to grasp the meaning of being part of an informed electorate. It is up to adults to set a good example for youth.

We have vastly greater access to knowledge and high culture than our parents and our grandparents, yet we are no smarter for it. This is "the paradox of the Dumbest Generation," according to Bauerlein. "The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now."

Bauerlein wraps it up quite nicely in the final chapter. He illustrates, via Washington Irving's telling of the tale of Rip Van Winkle, the need to have diverse knowledge of the past and the present in order to have a functioning democratic society in the future. He fears today's youth "will be remembered as the fortunate ones who were unworthy of the privileges they inherited. They may even be recalled as the generation that lost that great American heritage." We need an informed electorate for a democracy to work.

Was this book the alarmist rant of an aging professor fearing the loss of this country? In a way, yes. Could Bauerlein have taken a more sympathetic tone when talking about youth? Probably. I guess the accusatory tone and the seeming villification of Millennials is what took some pleasure out of reading this book for me. But the content, and the ultimate message, are important and real. I'm just not sure what the answer is.

the design of everyday things

the relationship between makers and users is not something i've ever really considered before this week's reading assignments. david norman states that the reader will not look at anything the same after reading his book, and after reading the intro and a chapter, i believe this is true.

the concept that user error is often not the fault of the user is brilliant and something i've never considered. humans are inherently hard on themselves and so our natural inclination is to blame ourselves and feel stupid if we can't operate an "everyday thing." but when there are no visual cues as to how to operate said thing, it is no surprise that it might baffle us. i think norman is fair in giving credit to designers, highlighting the difficulty in creating something that is easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, affordable, and facilitates pleasure of use.

he argues that it is when something (a button, switch, etc) is arbitrary, there is greater room for user confusion. the more functions something (a button, switch, etc) can perform, the more confusing that something is. when things have one distinct purpose, it is simple, elegant and easy to use -- all elements of good design.

norman writes, "if people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual." so true. but we do keep buying poorly designed products. sometimes in the name of thrift, sometimes because there isn't an alternative that has been designed well.

i take a lot of aspects of the design of everyday things for granted. for instance, norman discusses the importance of the principle of feedback: "sending back to the user information about what action has actually been done, what result has been accomplished." feedback is something i take for granted. it is something that sometimes annoys me: the noise made when pushing a button on the microwave; the pop-up dialog box asking if i'm sure i want to delete something, etc. but if these feedback features didn't exist, i would make many mistakes, i am sure.

i'm currently interning at a media solutions/video production company. my supervisor has been working with a team of developers to create a custom content management system for a major client. it entered the beta phase of testing the second week i was there. my task is to stress-test the system, finding and reporting bugs, and to make suggestions for workflow enhancement. essentially, i am a test-user. when norman discusses the lack of testing prior to the implementation of the unintuitive phone system, it shocked me. it would be similar to my supervisor just throwing this CMS to the client without making sure 1.)the bugs were worked out and 2.)it was designed well enough for someone with basic understanding of CMS, but without training, to be able to hit the ground running with.

i have already found myself examining the design of everyday things and thinking about the ways that they have likely evolved from their original design, due to user influence.

interview with andrew feenberg

it was interesting to read what feenberg had to say about user influence on design. as a user, i tend to take for granted that designers/technicians design and create with me in mind. apparently, i tend to be wrong. his anti-deterministic view of technology brings to mind my own thoughts on free will and destiny.

feenberg explains that, often, designers have a pretty narrow view of the functions of the technologies, designing them for one use. users then interpret the new technologies to suit their needs, finding new uses that were never conceived of by the designers. specifically, he says "people who design technologies don't think about human communication in the first instance. They think about other things and communication is added on later under the influence of users." Feenberg gives the example of the Internet's original intended use revolving around information and its evolution into a nexus of communication.

in this way, users contribute to the design of technologies, though it is almost always after the fact.

when feenberg discusses his views on critical theory of technology as a "critique of domination exercised through the organization of technically mediated institutions," he gives the example of broadcasting's allowance for one point-of-view to dominate information dissemination (rupert murdoch is named). he says that broadcasting doesn't allow much room for infiltration of independent voices, but the internet does. this ties into his idea of viewing technology as a "quasi-political institution." when he brings this up he is referring to the feedback loop between user and designer. users' abilities to communicate their needs and the designers' meeting these needs corresponds to the level of democracy found in that technology. when designers fail to meet these needs, users find their own ways to do so, creating "hacks."

he poses the question: "what is going to turn out to be more significant - the momentum of this mass culture of the Internet, or the lobbying and the bribery that corporations will use to get it under control?" i think that we are on the brink of finding out the answer to this question. we're hearing talk of media outlets charging for content, which i think will have major implications as far as the answer to this question. the struggle between free access to information and the ability for organizations who provide this information to survive financially will likely not end anytime soon. users will have to decide whether they want free information that may be of lower quality or if they'd rather pay for high-quality content. this is difficult because it sort of goes against the grain of the beginning of the Internet, when everything was vast and free. it seems the honeymoon is nearly over.

pew internet report: measuring our online footprint

this pew report explores a shift in perceptions and realities of privacy in a digital and transparent age. as we register on more and more social and media sites, we reveal more and more about who we are. as the report states early on, "the more content we contribute voluntarily to the public or semi-public corners of the Web, the more we are not only findable, but also knowable."

i was thinking, while reading, that the statistic that "it is still the case that most internet users are not social networkers or bloggers" was a reflection of the datedness of the study. true, it's only about 2.5 years old, but that is a long time when discussing social media trends. then i read brad's blog post about the study -- he points out that we are the "confident creatives." since i have been pretty participatory on the web since we got AOL at our house, it is hard for me to imagine that the majority of internet users aren't of the same mindset and practices as me.

i don't think i was particularly shocked by any of the findings in the report.

i have been afraid to google my name for the last 5 or so years. once in 2004ish, a friend and i googled ourselves and the top result for me was a scathing review of an article i had written freshman year for the student magazine i wrote for at university of buffalo. the website was some juvenile venture and i didn't take it too hard, but i decided to never google myself again because i'm too sensitive. but in the spirit of participation, i googled myself this weekend. and, like a decent portion of those surveyed for the pew report, i was surprised at what turned up.

i thought that since i blog about 4 or 5 times a week, there would be a bevy of links to my blog, but i was wrong. since i don't use my first and last name on my blog, posts on friends' blogs that use my first and last name appear at the top of the stack of results. my linkedin profile is the first result, a profile i haven't touched in about two years.

there is a certain sense of creepiness and big-brotherness to being able to type your name into a search engine and have results pop up. at the same time, we find it useful when we need/want to find out about other people. it has to work both ways.

What value do users derive from social networking applications?

as a user who is pretty much totally opposed to facebook applications (with the exception of a month-long bout of Scramble addiction), i entered this reading from a pretty cynical mindset.

i enjoyed the concept of defining "cool" because isn't that the age-old question? what is cool? apparently sex and the city RPG on facebook is cool. who'd'a thought?

like the social media revolution video assigned this week, i believe the intended audience for this study would be business owners, marketers and advertisers. i am none of these things and don't know that i ever will be. although, this is exactly the reason i have an aversion to apps: i believe they are all (okay, maybe not all) subversive tools of marketers trying to use us as pawns in the game of Turning a Buck. i do all in my power to rise above these sneaky mindgames. also, most facebook apps seem kind of silly to me.

I'm not sure what new information the study really revealed. in the Conclusion section, the authors state, "There is no global solution to developing and application that will be widely encouraged and used." they admit that their findings were not surprising. does this mean the study was unsuccessful? i'm not sure.

i believe that it is important to establish definitions for concepts that are relatively new but aren't going anywhere. i believe that it is important to conduct research now that can be used as a reference point for comparison in future studies.

interestingly, after finishing reading this piece, i scanned my facebook homepage and saw this link in a friend's status update. his status said something to the effect of "now you'll all understand why i don't accept your application invitations."

Social Media Revolution video

this video was so intense. immediately, the van halen song "right now" came to mind. and then the female singer started singing "right here, right now, right here, right now." i lost it.

i imagine the intended audience for this video would be businesses that haven't quite made the jump to digital and social marketing. it is hard to imagine that anyone out there doesn't realize that social media is not just a fad and is "a fundamental shift in the way we communicate."

the presentation seemed a bit abrasive and urgent to me. the statistics presented were, indeed, interesting. and i suppose if you're trying to convince a stodgy, stuck-in-his/her-ways business owner, the message might need to be presented so strongly.

aside from my aversion to the unnecessary intensity of the video, i do think it was well-produced. it had some of the same stylistic elements of "the machine is us/ing us:" e.g. typing in a twitter interface while discussing twitter.

one argument made took me aback: "Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passe." really? i'm not sure which generation I'm in, but i consider e-mail awesome.

professional investigation

after reading Hey unemployed media professionals!, i am shocked that the author does not mention online identity.

my online identity is something i am constantly waffling about. my blog is a really important part of my self-expression and i often don't contemplate the content/message of a post before clicking "publish." there is occasionally questionable material and i will be reminded of this by emails from my father. most of what i write is not really worthy of being read by anyone, it's just catharsis for me. over the last year, i've started a few side-blogs, none of which made it past a few posts: holiday mantis, we hate you, i can't stop.

i think that if there is one thing standing in the way of me getting a totally killer job as a video producer for a local news organization (that would be the ideal position for me) after earning my MA in new media studies, that thing will probably be my online identity.

and this is where the struggle comes in: do i sacrifice self-expression in the name of finding a job? i don't think that is something i can justify. this is a murky area ridden with fine lines and slippery slopes. i suppose the job determines the amount of importance on online identity. but much like i think drug testing for jobs is silly, discounting me as a potential job candidate because i write a blog about synchronicity and am often saracastic is silly.

anyway, back to the blog post and things she actually did mention:

i think her 5 main points hold true. you gotta be in it to win it and you can't expect to win fame and fortune by maintaining a blog.

online media as a career field is still new. no one really knows any sure-fire secrets to securing a job. this isn't law school or med school. and i think that's part of what makes it so exciting. we can do whatever we want. we can create a new job that has never existed before to suit our desires. to me, that sounds much better than taking the bar exam.

microvlogging

so i just learned about microvlogging this morning and immediately opened an account.

i am pretty anti-twitter, at least for my own personal use. i don't really care what other people do, but i have been against it from the very beginning.

but. i'm a big fan of the vlog. i am guilty of recording and editing vlogs, but not posting them to the internets because they make me feel self-absorbed.

anyway, i think robo.to is pretty fun. i don't know if it really serves a purpose, but it makes me giggle.

Multimodal Discourse/ Remediation

my first impression upon completing this reading, was that multimodality allows for individualization and the ability to convey a message more effectively than in a monomodal form.

the overlapping functions of the four semiotic strata kress and van leeuwen define (discourse, design, production and distribution) brought to mind the dimensions of media from the turnley paper we read earlier this semester. it seems to me that without defining the discourse, design is impossible. and of course without the design, there is nothing to produce or distribute.

the discussion of provenance and experiential meaning potential interested me. inspiration and what springs forth from it is something i think about a lot. a few months ago i wrote a blog post about how sometimes i resent art because it makes everything seem inauthentic. i feel like everything is cliche and nothing is genuine because it is this endless cycle of provenance and experiential meaning creation. i received comments, and i have gone back and forth in my own mind, saying that it is okay and that is what art is for and that is just how the world works.

this, i think, ties into the reading by bolter and grusin from "Remediation." remediation is defined as the process of new media (specifically, in this case, digital media) defining themselves by borrowing from and/or repurposing old media. the reading also focuses on immediacy and hypermediacy. immediacy is the "perfection, or erasure, of the gap between the signifier and the signified, such that a representation is perceived to be a thing itself [via]." hypermediacy's goal is make the viewer aware of the medium/media in use.

essentially, the argument made in Remediation is that new media is necessarily derived from old media. and it can never escape that or hide it or transcend it. "Repurposing as remediation is both what is 'unique to digital worlds' and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness." This quote reminds me of my blog post about resentment for art. Because everything is derivative, nothing is pure. And i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it can get me down on days i'm feeling particularly uncreative. i think the lesson to be taken away from this reading is that it's okay to build upon the past and make it better; make it your own.

so basically, the provenance of an old medium can lead to the experiential meaning potential of a new medium being realized and help to form the new medium until it takes on its own "personality," if you will.

homeless tv

i recently started an internship at a web video production house and this youtube video was sent around by the head producer. it's pretty funny:



on a related note, have y'all heard about the newest american girl doll? she's homeless! and costs just shy of $100.

check out danah boyd's research

So this post is about a study/speech that I wanted to use for the Pew report assignment but I wasn't sure if it was statistics-laden enough. I figured I should write about it anyway.

The woman who gave this speech/performed the research is really awesome. A friend turned me on to danah boyd's work a handful of months ago and I like what she's doing. She focuses on how teens use the internet and social networking to socialize and how it reflects their real life interactions.

I got really pumped when I saw this article on the root (an off-shoot of one of my top 3 sites, slate) because i saw danah's name.

what i gather from essays i've read by danah boyd is that the online social networks are often reflective of what the teens are trying to project in real life (meatspace) social circles. her argument with this research is that the same class and racial segregation that occurs in the cafeteria and study hall occurs online on myspace/facebook. she says in the root interview: "[Social media] is their hanging out after school. It reflects all kinds of things back at us that mirror and magnify what we like to pretend doesn’t exist."

and it's not just saying that only one race has a significant presence on one site and a different race has a significant presence on another site. she also looks at friending trends. online, as in real life, she has found a lot of segregation.

i have a 14 year-old niece and i keep a pretty vigilant watch over her myspace and facebook pages. it is smack-you-in-the-face clear that teens' online identities are a huge part of their real life identities. she is constantly begging for picture comments and posts about 7 versions of the same photo. she broadcasts who her best friend is that week and what boy she's in love with.

i think the research danah boyd is performing is really relevant and useful. this is a whole new animal for parents of teens to deal with, what with cyberbullying and cyberpervs and predators. since parents of today's teenagers didn't grow up with the internet, let alone facebook, they need all the insight they can get.

Pew report: Networked Families

October 2008, Networked Families, by Barry Wellman, Aaron Smith, Amy Wells and Tracy Kennedy

This report is an examination of how new technologies, namely cell phones and the Internet, play a role in family relationships and closeness. The researchers examined a few different types of households for their study: married without children, married with children (ages 7-17), multiple non-married adults and children in one house, multiple non-married adults and no children in home, and single parents.

Ultimately, the researchers found that most people feel new technologies have had a positive impact -- if any -- on their familial relationships. The majority of those surveyed said they think the closeness in their families are equal to or greater than the levels of closeness they experienced growing up.

Before reading this report, I thought of a current commercial for a cell phone service provider (the company escapes me now). Two little girls are texting each other: "what r u doing?" "eating, lol. u?" then the camera pulls back and the viewer sees that they are sisters, sitting next to each other at a dinner table with their mother and father. father rolls his eyes in exasperation. i have no doubt this happens at many dinner tables in real life.

I also thought about the family I used to be a nanny for and how the kids would, if allowed, spend hours upon hours online. They were really into webkinz, and would get completely hypnotized by playing in this online world. All three of them would crowd around the computer and argue over whose turn it was to man the controls.

A major point in the study is: "The internet enables shared 'Hey, look at this!' experiences." This point is made in conjunction with the finding that 52% of those surveyed that fall into the married-with-children category go online with another person at least a few times a week. This refutes the assumption that internet use can be isolating. I thought this was an interesting point to make and at first I balked at it. I wrote in my notes, in fact, "This is still passive interaction," comparing it in my mind to television. But upon further reflection I think maybe there is some validity to the point that sharing "hey look at this" experiences can nurture closeness. As with any kind of media (books, magazines, radio programs, television), digital media can spark robust conversation and debate and help people learn more about each other.

The wording about the finding that people surveyed claimed they watch less television "thanks to the internet" was troublesome to me. Not all television is bad. Most of it is bad, but there is worthwhile, enriching programming out there. There is also a lot of bad, unproductive internet content. I'm not convinced that watching less television and using more internet is a positive thing. Not to say it is negative, but I found the wording to suggest the former.

The study notes that spouses often keep in touch throughout the day via cell phone calls. Most of their calls are just to say hi and check in with each other, rather than making major plans.

A few points made in this study brought to mind McLuhan's argument that we ignore and/or understate the amputations caused by new media. One sentence in particular stands out: "Roughly nine in ten internet users say that the time they spend online has had no impact on the amount of time they spend with friends, family or at social events." I don't know if I buy that. I do believe that people responded that way, but I don't believe it to be true. I know that I have been distracted and then been late to meet with friends/family because I was on the Internet. I also have been victim to the iphone: I'm out to dinner/drinks/whatever with a friend who has an iphone and he will look something up on wikipedia mid-conversation. When this happens, while we're all physically together, we aren't mentally in the same place. I think this is more detrimental to interpersonal relationships than being too busy with work to go out to dinner. I think people are in denial of their abilities to forget that they are spending time with someone and that it is rude to surf the internet on your phone or text with other people.

In the end, the study argues that for most families, cell phones and the internet have been mostly good additions to the households.

Todd Kappelman's critique of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message"

I read this article before doing the other two readings, and it served as a nice introduction to what I was about to get into.

Kappelman's discussion of extenstions and amputations brought to mind something I've heard about the loss of one sense causing an enhancement in the others. For example, a blind person might have a superior sense of smell and of hearing. It also brought to mind the necessary polarity of progress, as in most aspects of life. Nothing comes for free -- there has to be some sort of sacrifice.

Kappelman notes that McLuhan is concerned with the extent to which humans ignore the amputations and focus only on the positive parts of extensions created by new technologies. He calls this "over-extension," and says it ends in a "reversal of the benefits." The example Kappelman uses -- the culture of high-speed transportation -- is a good one, and I found myself rationalizing why it's okay that we ignore the amputations of some aspects of it. It is indeed difficult to detach oneself, as McLuhan says we must, from a technological extension to truly analyze it.

The discussion of advertising was interesting to me. According the Kappelman, McLuhan saw advertising companies to be in control, but I think that time has changed this. Now, the consumer controls the advertisers, at least in part. Advertisers must bow down to our media-consumption habits and though sometimes they are sneaky (viral ads), they still have to follow our buying trends.

A conclusion I drew from this reading is that it seems we are constantly creating new technologies to make new extensions which make up for the amputations created with other technologies.

Excerpts from Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

I think I read this piece three times, maybe four.

My first impression was "whoa, he's talking about the Singularity," a concept with which I was fleetingly obsessed a few years back when I was into learning about futurism and transhumanism.

To address the grand matter at hand -- "the medium is the message" -- I needed some time to truly digest that. I went for a run with the idea that I would force myself to consider all of the reading I had just done, which is a challenge in and of itself. While running I thought about my iPod, and what its message might be. I pushed this further to think of the mp3 as a medium and the message that sends -- we want what we want and we want it to be compact and portable and we want to have as much as we can! I want to be able to carry my entire music library with me as I run along Lake Michigan. Do I need to? No. Do I listen to all the music in my iPod? No way. But I can.

On the second leg of my run, I was listening to an album I had just put on my iPod before leaving the apartment. This album was all I listened to for the better part of my 8th year of living. I had all these memories of listening to this album and idolizing the musicians. Listening to it now, with 24-year-old ears, I realize that I had no idea what I was singing along to. This album was about masturbation and drugs and sex and heartbreak and growing up and I had no idea. At the same time, I got it. I understood. I felt understood by the band even though at eight years old, I didn't know what most of those subjects were. This helped shape McLuhan's concept for me. Post-punk music as the medium, my 8-year-old mind received and comprehended the message. The content had very little to do with the impact the album had on me.

There are a few ideas McLuhan presents with which I'm unsure if I disagree or just don't completely grasp. His hot media vs. cold media conversation lost me a little bit. At first, I felt I understood it, but I have to agree Mentor Cana's assertion that TV is actually a hot medium, rather than cool.

Another section that left me completely in the dark is his statement, about "the century of the psychiatrist's couch." I tried so hard to wrap my head around that one, but no cigar.

I like the idea that the "content" of a medium is typically another medium whose "content" is often yet another medium. I think it is fun exercise in throught to parse the content of a medium through all the layers until you access the true "content."

I think I agree with much of what McLuhan has to say, that is, if I'm understanding it correctly.

"Critique of McLuhan’s Technological determinism viewpoint or lack of one thereof" by Mentor Cana

I did not enjoy reading this. It took me three times to finally make some sense of what Cana was trying to say.

Right from the start, I was unsure of what point Cana aimed to impress on the reader. "Critique of McLuhan's Technological determinism viewpoint or lack of one thereof?" Huh? Does he think McLuhan has a technological determinist point of view or not? I think that there is some technological determinism in McLuhan's ideas.

A major contention I have with Cana's essay is his assertion that McLuhan does "not address the process of technological innovation" and that the process of the coming-to-be of new technologies is something important that McLuhan is ignoring. The way I read McLuhan, he does address the process of technological innovation, however implicitly. In the excerpts from "Understanding Media" assigned in class, McLuhan says that in order to understand the technologies and extensions of man, we must first examine aspects of the media which begins with looking at the "never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society." Cana also states that because Man creates these technologies, Man is actually in control. He seems to think that McLuhan suggests that once a technology exists, it is running the show. The feeling I got from reading McLuhan is that it a more entangled situation than that: Man has a need, Man creates technology to suit need, technology giveth and taketh from Man, Man creates new technology to account for downfalls of other technology, ad nauseum.

The first time I read through this piece, I was very resistant to buy into any of Cana's claims. But after re-reading it and re-reading the McLuhan piece, it all started to come together for me.

One point that I can come to grips with that Cana makes is that it is difficult to consider the content independently of the medium. Cana makes the assertion that, indeed, the content is dependents on the medium. And the message each delivers is not the same. However, McLuhan seems to have little interest in content, so I'm not sure Cana's point is very important in his critique. McLuhan makes the argument that the content of a medium is often another medium whose content is often yet another medium. It takes a while to bore through the layers of media to find the information that is being transmitted.

In the end, I think that Cana's ideas were bogged down by his language.

The Machine is Us/ing us

This video is a good way of demonstrating the theme in Turnley's piece that the medium is an important part of the message. Using new media to demonstrate the evolution and power of new media is effective. I particularly like when he went into the source code to briefly explain the change from HTML to XHTML to XML.

Also, toward the end when he highlights blurbs from text about how we "teach the machine" when we click on links and tag information, I was reminded of Bush's "As We May Think," and his idea of an associative trail through information rather than something indexed and linear.

"Giving up my iPod for a Walkman" by Scott Campbell

This was a cute little article. The point-of-view was interesting and I especially liked when he admitted it took him three days to figure out there was music on the other side of the tape. I grew up with cassette tapes -- didn't get a CD player until I was 10 or so -- so I can't imagine not intuitively understanding how they work.

Campbell writes, "Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis." When I first read this sentence I agreed. But then I remembered how my friends were behaving in the week leading up to the release of the newest iPhone and the roll-out the night before of the software upgrade ...

What I liked most was reading the readers' comments -- people nostalgic for the simplicity of an outdated technology, even though we all anxiously await Apple's latest release.

"Towards a Mediological Method" by Melinda Turnley

I'm happy to say this was less painful to read than anticipated.

A prevalent theme in Turnley's piece that I think is very important for media-makers is the idea that the medium is part of the message it is communicating. The medium is not simply a means to and end. It is also a part of the end. One has to consider the most effective medium to use to convey a message, and also consider how this medium will impact the message. A motto early on when I worked at a newspaper creating multimedia content is: "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." This is an exciting time of emerging media and it is fun to try new things and new ways of presenting information. But the creator has to be aware and critical enough to consider which way is best.

Turnley's piece fit nicely with the Vannevar Bush article. I found myself scribbling little notes in the margins while reading "Towards a Mediological Method" alluding to Bush's article, namely in her explanations of the economic and archival dimensions.

I think I was most enlightened by the explanation of the epistemological dimension. "Once a medium's methods for structuring information are culturally normed, that medium becomes associated with certain definitions of intelligence, facility, and literacy." This idea had never really occurred to me. I supposed I understood the concept on some level, but I had never really put it into words as Turnley has.This also ties into socioeconomic factors. When a certain group of people are not literate in a medium, it is often because they don't have the resources to access it. I think of the National Broadband Plan and the stories I've heard about people being at major disadvantages because they don't have easy access to high-speed Internet. People who aren't connected to the Internet all the time are kind of living in caves, so to speak.

The overlapping of the dimensions within the explanation of each was a nice parallel to the idea of media convergence and what it means and how to analyze it. With more evolved ways of communicating messages that include multiple media with multiple implications, we are forced to consider many aspects of each.

However, this overlapping makes it difficult for me to parse the many ideas in Turnley's piece. I think I walked away from reading it with an understanding of what she is talking about, but it's the kind of understanding I can't readily put into a coherent message.

"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush

Knowing before I began reading it that Bush's As We May Think was a bit prophetic, I considered how I thought Ender's Game to be prophetic, what with the boards Valentine and Peter post on. Bush's piece is far more forward-thinking and right-on than Card's novel, though.

Writing in 1945, he argues we have a great deal of recorded human knowledge and experience without an efficient method of selection and retrieval. In a sense, we have too much knowledge and experience on record because we can't even use it if we aren't able to quickly sift through it to get what we need to suit our purposes. He envisions a method of record-keeping that allows the user/researcher to sort through records in an associative, natural manner, rather than the archaic method of his time -- pre-determined, indexed paths to obtaining information. He envisions a way to create "trails" of discovery from one piece of information to the next, akin to a stream of consciousness -- one datum leading to a related piece of datum leading to yet another, however digressive it may be.

This idea is very much like the WWW as we know it today. A rudimentary search about Mercury in retrograde can land a user at the homepage for the local Quaker Circle of Friends an hour later. How did he get from astrology to Quakers? Keep clicking the "back" button on his browser or check out his web history.

I think, though, that we are still experiencing a similar overwhelmedness (is that a word?) to the one Bush seems to express. There is so much information and so many ways to veer off the narrow path one intended to stay on that it is easy to lose focus when performing research on the Internet. I find myself seeing links on a page and thinking "Oh, I'll come back and check that out after i click this link" and then I never do end up returning. It is as though we have gotten too good at linking the different "trails" of information associations and I find myself getting overwhelmed and distracted, sometimes frustrated and put-off altogether.

Another concept Bush brings up that I liked is the idea of mechanizing repetitive thoughts/actions to free up the brain for more creative purposes. Likewise, he argues that if we have a better archiving system that allows for ease of access and navigation, Man can stop trying to remember everything. The archival technology will remember it for him, freeing up brain space for other endeavors.