Tag Archives: @KyleChinn1

A break from my cell phone

I decided to take most of the day off from my cell phone on Saturday because I wanted to see how if felt to not have it. I didn’t get a cell phone until 2004 so I knew I could manage it. First off I went to work without my phone which was a weird feeling. It was also somewhat scary because I’m a few peoples emergency contact info, so feeling disconnected was weird. I changed my voice mail so that if anyone needed to get in tough with me to call me at work. After I got home I used the rest of my day by working on my car and cleaning and getting things done around the house. It was amazing how much more productive I was by not being interrupted by text messaging. Later that evening I went to some friends house and still left my phone at home. It was actually a nice feeling not being distracted by texts and wanting to look at it while I was over there. I felt like I was more engaged with what was going on at all times. I almost forgot I had a phone, and my stress level was lower because I wasn’t constantly bothered by technology. The next day however was funny seeing the missed calls and people getting frustrated with me that I was not responding to them. We as society have become so reliant on needing to be connected to one another at all times that its now socially not acceptable to not get back to someone in a timely manner, which a decade and a half ago was not a big issue. This was a fun experiment.

Social Media

Social media has created a place for people with like minded ideas or just looking for an outlet to express their opinions on a subject, whether it be political or some kind of movement, and have that message be heard. According to Zandt , “Social Networking gives us unprecedented power to share our stories with more people than we ever imagined.” (pg. 159). This is so true with Facebook, and even older social media sites such as MySpace. They give the user the ability to share a highlight real of pictures, wall posts, likes and dislikes, and status updates. It allows other users into their digital world. So when it comes to coming together and trying to mobilize to seek social change, these Facebook posts can be linked to groups, blogs, twitter feeds and informative websites to help spread a message. It allows news (good, bad and false) to travel like a digital wild fire through the internet, and gives us the ability to have a large audience to view the issue. Items and issues of interest are much easier to not only be heard of but to also spread larger then before. Before social media we only had news from television and news papers, and as well as the radio. This is how we received our media. Now we have so many sources it can get somewhat overwhelming too. Social media has allowed movements to expand and issues to be heard. Its allowed for people to come together much easier and share or express an opinion easier then ever before.

Response 10

According to Webster Dictionary, a manifesto is defined “as a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer.” The hacker manifesto is a deceleration that a hacker is an intelligent person with motives of curiosity and not of destruction and crime as portrayed by society. Although they may be judged by society as criminals, we can never stop a hacker, as stated in the hacker manifesto “You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.”

My manifesto on freedom of online information… The internet has created a vast place with endless information. So much knowledge can be found on the internet. Just like everything evolves overtime, the power of knowledge has evolved. I now no longer need to wait for a book to arrive or pay for a class to learn something. When passion for knowledge is there, the internet is there to feed that passion. Why would we want to hinder learning? In this instantaneous world, we now have the power more then ever to learn. The internet keeps information in stone forever. This stone “cloud” of knowledge should be feeding us and we should not hide anything from us. No longer should humans be limited to information in order to expand our minds on our own. Academic journals and encyclopedias should be free for all people to view and read. The more we allow our selves to learn, the more we can grow as a society. Freedom of information is our human right.

Social Media and the User

Media changes the user. This is so true when it comes to social media such as twitter, online video games, chat rooms.. but especially in the world of Facebook. According to Coleman, “Media use changes the user. With each shift in automation, simulation, and transmission, we discover not only new technologies but also new facets of ourselves.” (140) These new medias allow us to become someone different then what we are in real life, and in Coleman’s words, they allow the user “to be cooler than in life” (pg.125). Facebook is a place where you can connect with friends and share photos, status updates, and showcase what’s going on in your life. The problem is that Facebook has created an alternate reality for some in which they get to be viewed by others how they want to be perceived. Using specific photos, liking specific things can give the persona of really what ever the user wants. Some use it for just keeping in touch with friends, but others, Facebook is more then that, its their life, and it allows unsocial behavior to thrive where you may have friends in which you have never met in reality. This poses the question to me, can you truly have a friendship with someone in which you have never met before? Facebook has allowed this from when it went from just only college student users to global users of all ages. Facebook has become a social necessity now in our daily lives. Now that people have become so dependent on social media like Facebook, could our society ever go back to an age before without it?

Red Riding Hood blog post

There are three distinct mediums for presentations, oral, print and electronic. Electronic has by far the least amount of boundries of the three. Electronic media allows creators to engage the viewers much more then what can be done with print and oral. For instance, the Remix of Red Riding Hood in a digital story is based off the concept of the oral and printed story, but with an animated electronic medium the viewer now has the ability to participate in the outcome of the story. As stated by Hayles “Just as the twentieth century saw an explosion of interest in the book as a medium, with an impressive canon of artists’ books and other experimental practices exploring the potential of the book as an artistic and literary venue, so electronic literature has seen a growing body of work that interrogates networked and programmable media as the material basis for artistic innovation and creation.” (2 genres of Electronic Literature) Electronic media is giving an imagination and interaction to books in a way that print cannot do.

The medium is the message by Marshall McLuhan is about invisible forces in their environment that are influencing them in the present by arranging ideas of one on one page, and one on the other, which makes us the reader figure out how to mix them together to create our own ideas. This is a good concept for doing a remix and establishes the viewer or reader has to be engaged in the story in order for it to work, and with electronic media allowing the reader to interact and choose the adventure of the story, this is now more possible then ever before.

Blog Post 6

I decided to view the digital story “Shy Boy” by the author Thomas Swiss. As I read the story I found that the music ever so slightly in the background and the color of the animated boxes changing as the text told me the story, I could feel the emotion of the shy boy. I felt that this story would always have to be digital in order to feel the emotion the words are telling. The author could of just put shy boy on print to read, but I personally do not think you would get the same feeling, and it could leave the story up to the readers interoperation. Hayles describes literature that is born digital as a “first generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (1). This is so true for Shy Boy. I even think it could of started off as a text written story, then turned digital after, but once it went digital you could not go back to just reading it on paper. It would not have the same feeling. Digital stories such as Shy Boy that were born and designed digital can express much more emotion over just reading. The author is able to manipulate our emotions and make us feel the way they intended the story to be by adding music and lighting. These things cannot be done by analog text and requires the readers imagination to create the mood. Animation and music provide more depth to the story making it a more enjoyable experience for the reader.

Blog Post 5

The Star Wars Mountain Dew film flirts heavily with copy right infringements. Most of it is ok and within legal limits of not breaking anything, but some parts do. For instance, the first thing I saw was the opening credits the famous Star Wars Yellow text telling us a story about what the film is going to be about. The creator of the movie should not of used the actual Star Wars logo as that is copyright protected. For a spoof film they should of gave is a different title such as the spoof film “Space Balls” it can purposely look the same style, but it cannot say “Star Wars.” The film creator did a good job by not using any actual Star Wars music either which is also copyright protected. The next issue I was the film used a Star Wars video game for the opening scene which is probably a copyright issue too. Lastly the film used a can of Mountain Dew and showed the logo, so with out paying for it that’s an infringement too. The most important thing to consider here is that as long as the film is never published the editor is probably fine, but placing it on youtube may have been a bad choice as now its public. People post songs and many things on youtube and it becomes a copyright gray area. Making spoof films is ok just like Space Balls did about Star Wars, but they slightly alter all the iconic parts of the film so it looks close, but its not the same, so therefore no copyright laws are broken. This film maker missed a few of those.

New Media Object – GoPro Camera

GoPro cameras are becoming some of the most popular and versatile video cameras on the market. They are small, durable, water proof and can record amazing high definition videos and pictures. Another major benefit to these cameras is that they are very simple to use and the quality they produce is truly amazing. According to Manovich, “cinematography, which means writing movement, the essences of cinema is recording and storing data in a material form. The film camera records data on film; a projector reads is off” (pg. 26). The GoPro does just this, but stores the film digitally on a hard drive in the camera, so it can be retrieved later. The GoPro heavily relies on Manovics’s 4th characteristics of new media, Automation. The GoPro auto sets and adjusts white balancing and knows what to do for light levels so you get a very good picture quality with very little effort. The GoPro is basically a computer then a video camera. It does the same functions as any hand held camera, but it’s designed to be slim and easy to use, and that’s why they are so popular. Automation and software is what makes the GoPro such a popular camera for people looking for high quality video and user friendly usability. It automatically stores the data as a MP4 format which is very common for most video editing software so you can easily make videos on any computer. This is a digital media object because we no longer need to shoot video on film to make videos, and the quality has surpassed the possibilities of what film quality could produce.