Video Reading Response

Reading Response #4

1. Since the 1980’s, the news media has changed not only its mediums, but also its entire model. For instance, the television news new to the ‘80s that Neil Postman described as “fragmented news…without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore, without essential seriousness” has been replaced by the even more immediate news outlet of the Internet (Postman 100). Now, not only have the traditional professionalism and news values of auditory and visual news been corrupted and condensed, but even the written word has been reduced to barebones in order to keep the ever shortening attention span of the reader. Needless to say, Postman would be endlessly cynical about the current day as he was about his own era; what he recognized about the transformation of television news in his own day was only a very small-scale version of what the Internet brings to the table. Television, he said, consists of fragmented news that “will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal” (Postman 104). Imagine what he would make of the many ads and distractions that plague the Internet, especially considering the fact that the viewer can simply click away with their attention span.

2. Citizen journalism’s advantages lie mostly in its expansion of journalism as a whole. For example, in the past, journalism relied entirely on a staff of editors deciding what limited number of stories would be brought to the public’s attention. It also relied on the journalists themselves being able to get a hold of certain information and/or media. Now, the public has access to an unlimited amount of stories, all of which they can view from a vast variety of different points of view and angles covered by different people. They also have access to facts and/or photos or other media that citizens affiliated in some way with a story were able to capture that no one else has. There will always be a gap in quality between the two; lots of citizen journalism is poorly written, features enough bull-headed opinion to drive readers away, and is, overall, sloppy in its delivery and because of this, professional journalism will always exist and have a home. It is simply evolving to rely more on give-and-take between the professionals and the general public. As Clay Shirky states in Here Comes Everybody, “the primary distinction between the two groups is gone. What once was a chasm has now become a mere slope” (Shirky 77).

3. While “Journey to the End of the Coal” is not top-level professional journalism in a traditional since, largely because it does not feature eyewitness accounts and quotes from real life people and relies on a fictionally structured maze to hammer home its point, it is on par with the New York Times article “Graft in China Covers Up Toll of Coal Mines” about the same topic in that by engaging the reader in making the decisions to solve the case it presents, “Journey to the End of the Coal” offers a much more interactive inside look at the issue at hand. It is the citizen journalism that Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody to the New York Times’s professional journalism because it pulls in the lesser attention spans of today’s media consumer more effectively than traditional print media and implants its message just as effectively.

Autoethnography

https://googledrive.com/host/0Bylt4RxgmEpMY3dBdjdJaUhCSkk/

Reading Response #3

1. In “the Watchdog and the Thief,” Nicolas Carr thoroughly discusses Marshall McLuhan, an author who first came into relevance 50 years prior, because McLuhan’s arguments about technology’s effect on the human condition have proved to be true time and again ever since. “When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium’s effects are good or bad,” Carr writes, the base of their argument is the medium’s larger impact on their lives, just as McLuhan argues is true in his saying: “the medium is the message” (Carr 2). As Carr’s book is about the internet, this argument is ever relevant as the internet is currently taking up a large part of its users’ lives.

2. Sherry Turkle’s “the Flight From Conversation” explicitly argues that the constant connection of internet communication we are becoming accustomed to is destroying the fabric of conversation itself. In real conversation, she argues, we “tend to one another,” or that is, we learn to truly understand one another for more than surface qualities in a slow burning way (Turkle 1). Through things like Facebook or texting, we speed that process up to the bare minimum and thus, eliminate the deep understanding we can gain from real conversation. We become more concerned with keeping people at the perfect distance, “not too close, not too far, just right” as well as perfecting and presenting the self we want to be (Turkle 1). I find this argument to be extremely accurate. For me, it’s as simple as Turkle’s argument about posting statuses on Facebook; if you refrain from posting something on there that you might have come to reveal in a private conversation, then you’ve lost out on connection. 

Carr, meanwhile, focuses on the effect this new media is having on our minds and the way we think in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He argues that the instant gratification of the internet is causing our minds to work in a way almost akin to those with ADHD. He states, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” and it is hard to argue with him on that, as I have experienced this as well. As a journalism major, I am constantly surfing the web for stories ideas and writing inspiration in addition to the huge amount of junk I mindlessly scan through in my spare time. Though it is not instantaneous, I too have experienced a slow decreasing in my ability to concentrate. Sitting still and just relaxing has become more difficult; I have a constant urge to take out my phone and surf. Whether or not this is damaging remains to be seen, but the correlation is there, nonetheless. 

3. While the possibilities of Shelley Jackson’s “My Body: a Wunderkammer” are not infinite, they are certainly vast. In this way, Lev Manovich’s variability principle functions in the project. As Manovich defines it, variability means media can exist and be experienced in numerous different versions as a result of coding (Manovich 56). This can be seen in Jackson’s project as through clicking different parts of the body and different hypertext within that, each user can have a different, unique experience of it. Through its hypertext, the reader is able to experience themes of the piece in a more abstract and experimental way. “My Body: a Wunderkammer” certainly can be classified as literature because it features extensive content through writing; it may just be the literature of the future. 

Reading Response #2

1. By “the medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan means that new technology molds how and how much human interaction takes place. He defines “medium” as any technology as well as “any extension of ourselves” and “message” as the effects that any medium has on human affairs (McLuhan 1).  As a result, the “medium” becomes a transmitter of a “message” only when it in some way, shape or form impacts the way the humans using it live their lives, or as he puts it, “it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (2).

2. Jason Rohrer’s “Passage” embodies all of Lev Manovich’s principles of new media in some way. It embodies the principle of “Numerical Representation,” or that “an image or shape can be described using a mathematical function” in that the game itself was undoubtedly created from digital code, as is the case with all new media (Manovich 49). It embodies the principle of “Modularity” in that the game’s media elements, largely shapes and sounds, are “collections of discreet samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts)” (51). It embodies the principle of “Automation” in that the user modifies the media object using templates, or in this case, using simple keys to navigate a created world template. It embodies the principle of “Variability” in that the game can exist in the countless amount of ways that you play it, or as Manovich puts it, new media “can exist in different, potentially infinite, versions” (56). Finally, “Passage” embodies the principle of “Transcoding” in that the game’s structure follows the “computer’s organization of data,” which in part can be found in the accompanying folders of the game’s download which contain numerous graphic and music lists (63).