My final post

Well, this certainly has been fun. Honestly, this is probably the most interesting engauging english class I've ever been in. No, I'm not just kissing up for a good grade. I really enjoyed the focus on the new media and things more relevant to our society than books that were written one hundred years ago. Not to say that old books can't be relevant and engauging, I personally loved Brave New World, but this divergance was extremely fresh and welcome. I might even miss this next semester when I have no english. Well, not necessarily the six page essays, but the thought and discussion that goes with them.

Speaking of essays, I think i like mine. I found out a lot about the file sharing debate and here people stand on it. I feel like a can make a real argument now when it comes up in conversation. Earlier in my blog I mentioned that I really liked Lessig's book. Now I might as well be married to it. It provided some extremely convincing stats and commentary for this essay. I was seriously interested in the book too though. After I read through the parts that were reletive to my argument, I couldn't help myself. I read the entire book in one sitting (well, most of it. There was a lengthy part in the middle concerning bussiness that didn't make any sense to me). I spent three hours that should have gone toward my essay reading that book. And although I still got the essay done in time, it really would have been nice to finish before 4 AM. Lessig is a smart man, I'll tell you that. I had to alter my argument after reading the book. I originally planned to argue that the files belonged to the people as long as nothing was payed, but that just won't work. It's just wishfull thinking. Neither side is really right in what they're doing, but file sharing is the lesser of two evils. Music is not dying because of file sharers, but the file sharers are really suffering. Theyr'e gettng the equivalent of a life sentance for j walking. It's just not fair.

Soooo.... That's it.

That's all I've got.

...

That can't be true, I have to have something here!

Here we go! Dancing robots!



And with that, I bid you farewell!

Once Again, at a Loss For Words.

Well, I've gotten a little lazy, but here's another wonderful blog entry. Today, I find myself at a loss for words, and since I have to write a six page essay, that's a reeeeeeally bad thing! I should be writing about the music industry and P2P file sharing, but I have no idea what to write. I want to write about how people should control the ownership of their music and not corporations, but that's pretty difficult. Especially since I can't seem to make "Free Culture" work. The page just won't load! That was probably going to be my best source and it isn't there! Now I feel like whatever I write is going to come off as "LOL college student arguing that his illegal actions should be legal...". Now all I have are dozens of articles explaining how dangerous and stupid file sharing is. Perfect.

...


Hmm...


Halfway through this entry I tried to access Free Culture. It worked... Maybe I can stop complaining now... It's nice, but it doesn't write my essay for me. =(

Ok, so other than this essay I need to write, maybe I can talk about social networks and how 90% of the class is too paranoid to use them. I was completely surprised by the number of people who refused to interact with 43 things! I could understand with stuff like Ryia, but 43 things? Come one guys! How's a marketing company going to make use of the fact that you want to kiss in the rain!? Honestly, if you are really trying to avoid aiding companies in knowing how to market products toward you, you might as well never leave your house, watch TV, or use the internet. To cut yourself off from all market research means cutting yourself off from society.

Well that's my two cents. Now I have an essay to write. Wish me luck, sense and sanity.

Peace out.

We can re-build it! We have the technology!

Yes! We can make it faster! Stronger! Like nothing the world has ever seen! We'll take this broken visual entertainment and make it into, "Lonelygirl"!

Honestly, I've never watched a single video from Lonelygirl, but the story on Wired was pretty cool. Although knowing that it was on Youtube, I would have been positive it was fabricated. No one is their real life selves online. The fabled web forum acronym, G.I.R.L., even proved to be true! For the less web savvy people out there, the proper usage of this would be:

Person A: Hi guys, I'm a girl.

Person 2: LOL. Sure, Guy In Real Life. There are no girls on the inernet.

IT WAS TRUE!!! There may have been a girl on screen, but a guy was writing her script! All joking and sexism aside, Lonelygirl was a brilliant idea. I never realized just how hard they tried to make it seem real without actually saying "This is real". The fact that the guys talked to a lawyer about it just struck me as really funny, but I suppose they would need it. There are morons out there who would probably tried to sue when they found out that she wasn't real. I'm actually very thankful for the style of entertainment that Lonelygirl started. My favorite online video series, Yugioh: The Abridged Series, probably wouldn't have been dreamed up without it. It's certainly a really cool idea, shows that are only a few minutes long, but how far can people run with it? The genres that can be covered seem kind of slim. Just comedy and teen drama. Could an action oriented program be done in this manner? That's what I want to see!

...*idea*

I just got a great idea! What if someone made a War of the Worlds kind of thing? Where its done in a radio transmission style portraying the action. What if someone told a story and fleshed out an entire science fiction world with only short diary entries from different people? That would be so cool! Think Lost, but you only get short clips from different people to tell you what's going on. You can get stuff from the protagonist, the antagonist, bystanders, anyone!

Wow, now I'm inspired, but I don't know what to do with it!!! I don't have the resources to do this! JJ Abrams! I demand that you start on this project immediately! Stop editing your new monster movie and make an online series!

Hmm, well that burst of genius strayed a bit from the topic. So, in conclusion online episodic content like Lonelygirl is a really good idea and JJ Abrams needs to hop on that train. It could be so much more than it is now. It's just going to take one really good, well funded series to get everyone to catch on. So that's it for now.

Later

Reading and Writing

I got around to reading Free Culture this weekend and I honestly couldn't stop myself. I read all the way up to chapter two before checking the course packet and seeing that I had gone too far. It was good stuff. The man was bringing together some very strong stories to support his case. The parts about the Wright brothers and FM radio were good, but what struck me the most was his chapter about the doshinji industry. Walt Disney copying has only come so far in America and it is slowly rolling to a halt, especially on the internet. On youtube, people are making five minute parodies of cartoons and movies. A video called "Yugioh: The Abridged Series" started the fad. The Youtube user Little Kuribo began making these videos where he pieced together bits of episodes of this cartoon and dubbed his own voice over. To people who used to watch the show, it was hilarious! He sparked dozens of other copycats and the views of his videos rose to over 1,000,000 people. Then, at about his fifteenth "episode", disaster struck. Youtube began to remove his videos for copyright infringement. THIS is exactly what Lessig is talking about! Some one is making the equivalent of a doshinji, keeping only likeness and changing dialog, story, and character personalities. He isn't even making any profit and his largest audience is 1,000,000 views, but apparently he is enough of a "threat" to a television show that isn't even on the air anymore that he needs to be squashed. It's absolutely ridiculous! We're not required to, but I plan on reading this entire book because I like the way Lessig thinks. He's got some valid opinions and points that need to be read by more people!

That takes care of the reading portion of my title, the writing involves my essay topic, WoW!!! Yeah, who would have thunk it? The one guy who plays World of Warcraft is going to write his essay about it! That's a shocker! I know it was in the examples of things you could write about, but I guarantee I would have come up with it anyways! I just need to come up with a good point to argue. I also need to figure out what the questions to consider were. I thought they were going to be put on the 108 blog, but they're not there yet! Now I have to try and write two paragraphs about a thesis I haven't come up with using questions that I don't know. Awesome. Well, I better get writing it. Till next time.

An interesting article I stumbled across.

I'm not usually big on making updates when i don't have to, but this really struck my interest.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=322407

A Nintendo employee got fired for talking trash about her co workers on her anonymous blog! Apparently, this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. Many other companies have fired employees for posting in completely anonymous blogs. I just thought this could be an interesting article to discuss in class, so here it is!

Miis!!!

STEVEN COLBERT!!!

More on memes.

In light of our current topic, I'm going to drone a little more about memes. The articles we've been reading seem pretty consistent to what I know about them. Memes are social fads that have been around forever, but are now spreading even faster due to the power of the internet. Actually, when I start to think about it, there's a lot of things that spread very similarly to memes in real life, but they just took much longer. Most legends seem to be pretty similar to memes. Vampires, werewolves, bigfoot. They all must have started somewhere and spread throughout the the world. The only large difference I see is purpose. The hamster dance was made to be funny, but legends were mostly made to... Well... I guess for the most part to entertain people. They were told around campfires like scary stories are now. So... Uhh... I guess that idea just got scratched. I suppose another difference is the time they have taken to set into our culture. Think about the hamster dance. When is the last time you saw that? How many years has it been since that thing was flying about the internet? It's old news! People have moved on. In another decade or so, it's likely it will show up on VH1s I love the 90s revisited and we will never hear of it again. Why is it that we're going to be making werewolf movies forever, but no one's going to care about modern memes in a coupe years? I think it's the time that older memes had to set in. Back when the idea of werewolves was spreading and becoming popular, what was there to take it's place? Nothing. There weren't people jumping up to make new legends, they were only expanding on previous ones. People didn't just move on after a few months. They stuck with it for centuries until werewolves had a deep history and legacy.

Even though modern memes and ancient memes fit the same definition, can we really call them the same thing? Isn't that kind of insulting to our culture that's developed over dozens of generations to be lumped in with things like the dramatic chipmunk? It just doesn't seem very fair. I personally think that the memes of the internet need a new name. Flash memes. I'll admit, I stole the idea from flash mobs, but it fits! They form suddenly for no real reason, they maintain themselves for a short time and then they dissipate.

Lastly, I'd like to add a little criticism towards the discussion we had on Wednesday's class. I really felt that the side of World of Warcraft was poorly supported. I was the only one there who actually played the game, and I really felt that the other people who were trying to support the game weren't helping at all. Yes, there are people who are payed to play the game in china and sell the currency for real money. Yes, there are cases of people dying from playing the game too much and neglecting their own bodies. These are extreme cases though. There are over eight million players in the US. The number of people who have negative consequences from this game is so small, it's not even funny. There are millions of players out there, just like me, who play this game as a hobby. I have legitimate friends in this game. it's the equivilant of a pen pal, but you get to chat whenever you get on. 90% of the content in this game requires a group of people to complete! Unless you go on a chinese server, you're going to interact socially with these people! You might realize the one person in particular seems better then the others. In the future, maybe you call on him to help you again. Then one day he calls on you for help. You get to know each other, inside jokes form, topics outside of the game come up. Before you know it, this person is your friend!!! It's no different than gaining friends through blogging, or even in real life! Completely legit' I say!

Now before I go, here's a video that's relevant to both memes and WoW. LEEEROOOOOOOYYY JEEEEENKIIIIINSS!!!!!

This video spread like wildfire across the internet. It probably did more to promote the game than Blizzards advertising at the time! Basically, it's a group of people talking about what their plan is for taking on the next room, when suddenly, Leroy runs in and screws everything up. To the untrained ear, they sound like they're legitimately talking about the game, but if you've played the game, the stuff they're spouting off is idiotic. The video was made as a joke, but when non WoW players saw it they thought it was even funnier because the people sounded serious. There's a nice chunk of strong language in the second part of the clip, just to give you the heads up. Enjoy.

How About Some Blog on Blog Action!

Yeah, it's a little crude, but it's the first thing I thought of when I decided to write this entry about blogging. I can honestly say that I was very impressed by this week's reading. I was one of the people talked about who didn't like blogs. I still don't really understand blogs. Sure, I write in it and other people read it and comment. So what? Why do I care if a small audience finds my personal life interesting? Why should I tell them about my life anyways? Honestly though, this reading has completely convinced me to make a real blog after this semester is finished. I'm not sure how much I'll update it, or what I'll put in it, but I apparently need to seriously try making one before I write it off as stupid. Meg's article was particularly interesting to me. Her and Jason are internet celebrities now. And it's just because they write stuff on their blogs!!! How crazy is that? Not that I expect to become famous across the intrawebs overnight or anything, but it certainly would be cool. But that's not my real motivation for writing a real blog. I'm not that vain. I really just need to try it for the sake of trying it. I suppose I've written it off as a sort of feminine thing. I mean, it's the equivalent of diary, isn't it? Except now you can have a crowd of people to react to it. Now I think I've reached the root of my problem, the people. I keep picturing this crowd as the part of the internet I avoid, flaky teenage girls. The kind who clutter their facebook pages with every stupid app they can find. I know those people would revel in showing off their lives to the world. The people who post on Gaia forums and think Neopets is the best game ever. AHHH!!! See! Look at me!!! I'm making horrible generalizations about this! This is why I really need to make a blog! There's a 90% chance I'm being an elitist moron and there's a great community out there!!! You know what? I'm shortening the time limit. Next week, I need to get a blog. Right after my ENGR 126 exam, I'll make one and it will probably be great.

Well, that's all about blogs that i have to say for now. I must admit that I am extremely excited about the meme stuff that we're getting into, simply because I'm a meme addict. I've been on every major meme to strike the internet since peanut butter jelly time. Most memes don't make it off the internet, that's why you have to stay clued in at the places where they're born. Message boards, youtube, image boards. All the places where they spread to first. Honestly, I'm very impressed with youtube as of late when it comes to good memes. We've got chocolate rain and the dramatic chipmunk in a relatively short time span, and they've both surfaced to real life. Just incase you somehow managed to miss them, here's the videos.





Peace out.

P.S. If at any time our wonderful, kind, and very intelligent professor thought she might be included in my description of bloggers, she is horribly mistaken! I did not at any point mean to include her in that category! That is all.

A Post About Nothing?

Hmmm...
Well, this is an interesting predicament. We haven't read anything this week! What's a guy to discuss and respond to? I suppose I could reflect on my writing process for my essay. Finding articles to support the argument that Youtube is not the amazing expressive wonder that Stephens appears to think it is. This isn't to say that it could eventually become viable, but right now it's not. It just isn't! What's the last real video with some real value to it to come from YouTube? I have yet to see it. Parodies and recordings of old show seem to be the only things I actually care about on YouTube. Actually, I do enjoy watching videos of video games and sometimes you see someone show off a pretty cool stunt or talent. But watching someone climb a building from the outside isn't comparable to what other mediums of expression offer. I already wrote an essay about this so I don't really feel like talking about it right now.

I'll move on to something else literature related. I recently started reading the biography of Einstein. It's interesting, but it's kind of dull. The reading is very flat like a text book. An interesting thing I learned was that Albert was a big fan of the violin. He would play it between his thinking sessions. I really just like to imagine what it would have been like to be him. He was a real genius, but he tried on multiple occasions to have a real family life. They all failed. He loved his children , but he could never stay with his wives. They all said that he just pushed them away. Even his children said that he never really let them get close. He understood so much about the universe, but so little about people in it.

I guess lastly, I'll just post a nice video of people climbing on buildings and doing all sorts of crazy flips. It's called Free running.

Thoughts on Images

In the last week, we've been reading a lot about the power of the image and how to best make use of it. Usually, it really kills me how much people analyze things. I get that feeling like when you say a word over and over again and eventually looses it's meaning. I sort of got that vibe from "Picturing Texts", but I was pleasantly surprised when I read "By the means of the visible". It managed to avoid making images into a dull textbook topic without giving up any intellectual value. So, if it would please the court, I would like to focus on that for this weeks entry.

I really liked Mr. Stephens' article. He delivers a truly unbiased opinion on both sides of the fence for images vs words. I was surprised that there was so much opposition to images in ancient times. I was well aware of the conflict and superstition that surrounded the invention of the camera, but I didn't realize how far back the fear of images reached. Some of it doesn't seem to make much sense, but then again, a lot of it does. I think the worries that people had about making images of god have come true. What do we think of when we imagine god? If you've seen Bruce Almighty, you may picture Morgan Freeman, but everyone else is likely to picture a kind old man with a white beard in a white robe. If god really exists, is that what god really looks like? Probably not. That's an image that people have invented for him and it's probably what the people of the old testament feared. God, the most holy and sacred of all things is being spread about with false images. Another fear is also coming true. He is becoming commonplace. By the spread of an image of him, people get used to seeing it. People become comfortable with it. He used to be a concept that was awe inspiring, but now that we can put a common image to him, he is something a bit less. We can look at him and compare him to worldly things, like Morgan Freeman.

Another fascinating thing that he said was that although we developed and progressed because we had sophisticated eyes capable of observing and analyzing thousands of different objects, plants and animals, we have reduced them to decoding a simple pattern of figures with similar color, shape and design places evenly on evenly spaces lines. Wow! We humans are certainly talented at doing the bare minimum! It astounds me that we couldn't come up with any more elegant method of communicating other than the word. Then again, we have, but they just haven't worked out. He discussed the failure of hieroglyphics's, but I was surprised that Japanese style of writing never came up. It was designed with the beauty of the image and the meaning of the character in mind. If you reach back to it's origins you can see that the characters for words like "dog" or "house" look extremely similar to an image of a dog or a house. It then slowly evolved further away from the image and closer to a simple symbol. I really think it deserved a mention in the piece due to the fact that it's similar to the egyptian writing, but also much more modern.

Well, that's about all I have to say about that. Till next time!

You can take the you out of youtube, but good luck getting the we out of web!

Despite the worries addressed by the article we read, I have complete faith in the internet's ability to not get sucked into corperate greed. Youtube has been under Google's control for quite a while now and the users have yet to truly suffer from it. Little to nothing has changed at all about the community. There are still hilarious memes. There are still TV shows and movies up on the site, despite the companies best efforts to get rid of them. It still feels like the users are in control and that's a good thing. I have a feeling that all the big companies are very careful about this factor and with good reason. Offline, if someone is dissatisfied with a product or service, there's usually not much they can do about it that doesn't involve spending a lot of time or money. Online, if a company loses the faith of it's users, they can jump ship to another website with different rules in seconds. They could even make their own website if no others seemed to fit what they wanted. This is precisely why I don't think the internet will ever lose it's "wild west" type of feel. In real life, the wild west got swallowed up because they ran out of space. You couldn't just run off and build a new town. On the internet, you can do just that! There are no space restrictions. The wild west lives on with every new site made.
It's impossible to kill the freelance, community feel of the internet because it's impossible to stop the freelancers and communities.

Now that that's taken care of, I think it's time to share something for that wonderful web community. It's a song by Weird Al called "Don't Download This Song", which he ironically released over the internet for free.

Fire in the Hole!

Fire in the hole is a malicious stunt that hurts the victim and doesn't let go. Internet sites have ensured that whoever gets attacked by this prank will be humiliated on an enormous scale. The restaurant workers do have some power to stop it though. They can track down the video and flag is as being offensive. Moderators could read their story and take it down. The fact that they can do this in no way negates the fact that web 2.0 is being used in horrible ways.

I do believe that we could be considered the not-so-greatest generation. Pranks like this have always existed, but they have never been glorified or run as rampant as they have with our generation. I guarantee that most of the people who do these things first heard of them on the Internet. The trouble makers of previous generations have been limited to whatever they could think of or what their friends could think of, but our generation has access to thousands upon thousands of ideas flying around in cyberspace. They can not only look up how to do it, but also see how it's done. Teens can watch these videos and see the creators hysterical reaction. in a sick way, it's inspiring to them. The criticism we receive is rightly given. The media is correctly warning people about these things and is in no way over hyping them.

I honestly don't think that the television shows that glorify these stunts really care what kids do. They might have a "Do not try this at home" disclaimer, but they do nothing to back it up. When kids do these pranks and parents hear that they got the idea from TV, it probably only makes the shows more popular. It's free publicity for the shows and it only makes them cooler to the kids. The problem is that other than cracking down and editing these things off of TV, there's not much that can be done to limit our generations exposure to these things. The best suggestion I could make would be to track down Bam and publicly charge him with assault for it. I doubt the people who originally preform these stunts and all of their imitators would be inclined to do them if they saw others getting in real touble.

Use computer. Click new post. Type title.

I have found the material we were assigned to read (and play) this weekend was very satisfying. The theme appeared to be the branching paths of reality. In the first piece, "The Garden of Forking Paths", the narrator became a wanted man when his commander was captured and discovered a link to the mystery of his past. This short story really brought into question the makeup of reality. I've encountered in my life the very same theory that the narrator's ancient relative was fascinated by, the thought that with every choice we make, a hundred other realities are set into motion where other choices were made. It was a romantic monologue where a young man is asking a woman to board a train with him to see where that particular reality might lead. It's almost mind boggling to think that if this theory is true, there are billions upon billions of realities where everything is exactly the same, but you don't exist. It's also almost as mind boggling to know that this theory has exited in the minds of men for hundreds of years. We are so quick to assume that talk of parallel universes and other strange and futuristic ideas is restricted to recent years when research has allowed us to explore these possibilities. To get back to the reading, I thought it was extremely interesting that the author had used to many references to games and mazes in the passage. It was almost as though he was challenging you to try and imagine how the narrator could have done things differently. What if he had used his bullet on Madden? What if he had confronted Madden on the train? Did he have to Kill Albert? What if he got on a different train? What if he decided to give up on the message and save himself? At risk of wearing the word out, the possibilities are mind boggling!

Next we got to read a segment from the book"If on a Winter's Night a Traveler". The entire portion of the book we read was the equivalent of taking a sledge hammer and putting it to good use on the fourth wall. The author spent the entire time discussing the series of events that might have lead to the reader reading the book. I found the entire thing to be incredibly entertaining and kind of funny. I actually have a friend who has already read the book, and judging by what he told me and this passage, I think I'm going to need to buy and read it. Every detail about where they bought it to what they might be thinking about the authors style as the read the first words (which incidentally have already been read creating almost a sort of paradox) are covered. It connects to the previous reading in an obvious way, discussing possibilities about the paths life might follow. I found the excerpt to be a little less though provoking and a little more entertaining than the previous one though.

YES! On to the most entertaining thing I had the privilege of reading. Zork! Zork is an entity that is not quite a video game, but it is beyond the scope of "choose your own adventure" novels. It is a game of Dungeons and Dragons (that must have been particularly good) where you are an adventurer searching for treasure in a hidden labyrith. It allows you to explore all the options that the adventurer might take. In my first game, I explored the forest outside the house and got lost in the canyon just outside the labyrith. I decided to try again, and this time I discovered an open window on the side of the house. It led me down into the labyrith where I found a few treasures, but ran out of room to hold things, and couldn't find my way out again. I had to stop to write this blog! The game is an expression of the ideas from the readings. You can choose from tons of different options and paths to take in the world given to you. You can play the game in a hundred different ways and get a hundred different outcomes. In one you drown. In one you are eaten by trolls. In one you escape with half the treasures. In one you get away with only your life and a sandwich you found! And in one special outcome you defeat the monsters, avoid the thief, and escape with all the treasure. Now if you'll please excuse me, I have to go try to find that outcome. Don't wait up, this could take a while.

New Media? Oh, New Media!

Yes, the ever popular new media! As defined by our good friend Wikipedia, "New media refers to new forms of human and media communication that have been transformed by the creative use of technology to fulfill the same basic social need to interact and transact". Youtube, AIM, Wikipedia, even this blog itself, they all fall under the definition of new media. I personally am a big fan of this new media! I regularly post on a number of message boards and sites like facebook. It gets information from point A to point B, no matter what the distance, in a matter of seconds. Best of all, it doesn't descriminate. If someone wants to say something, no matter what it is, they can broadcast it to an enourmous audience. This does tend to create problems though. Sources can be very unreliable with the new media. I can't tell you how many times I've seen false information spread via the new media and it has been thoughtlessly believed as the truth by hundreds of people. Places like Wikipedia, GameFAQS (the most trafficked videogame message board), and facebook have all fallen victim to this problem numerous times. Thanks to the lightning quick response of the online community though, these issues are usually very quickly resolved.

My favorite part of the new media by far is the interaction between the source and the reader. The clear line has been blurred to the point where it only exists if you want it to. I am now a viable source for editorials on video games. I can provide input in thousands of polls. I can fight mis-information and ignorance and my input is received instantly. If I make a claim, i can back it up with a video. This is the first time that everyone has truly had freedom of the press and i am all for it!

This is a blog. I shall write in it.

Hello world! Err... For the time being, hello class! This blog has been created for the purpose of discussing reading assignments that will be assigned over the following months. The theme apparently being "New Media". Spiffy, but more importantly this blog will be used to spread the word on anything I deem entertaining, or possibly even hilarious! For now, I'll just post one of my favorite music videoes ever, Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim. It involves Christopher Walkin dancing around an empty hotel and then flying! How could that possibly be bad!?
Enjoy, and I'll see you later!