The Author-Audience Struggle in New Media Storytelling: Research #4

In an attempt to bring this New Media class full circle, at least for myself, I looked specifically for an article that related and discussed storytelling on some level. Since one of the first ideas discussed in this class was the human need for stories and storytelling to communicate, I thought it was appropriate to touch on that broad theory again. Rob Cover's article, “New Media Theory: Electronic Games, Democracy and Reconfiguring the Author-Audience Relationship” discusses general New Media theory within several contexts. The primary aspect I am going to focus on is that of the author-audience struggle that has developed due to interactivity in media.

Cover describes the general author-audience struggle as “engaged in a struggle for control over the text in terms of participation, co-creation, transformation and distribution” (173). This can be seen most heavily within the video game industry. Neverwinter Nights, an online Role-Playing Game or RPG for short, is one of the most well-known games for allowing its users to have access to the basics of the game with the full knowledge that they will manipulate, transform, and distort the original game in an effort to create Mods. This is done to allow the game life to be extended. With the ability to create your own story, users can develop the world of Neverwinter Nights further than its original creators did. This is relative to Cover's theories about author-audience struggle because the users, or audience, of Neverwinter Nights has become its authors as well. Although original copyright and authorship rights still remain the property of the original creators, the game extensions belong to its various audience members. This creates the struggle that Cover references.

Another video game in the same situation as Neverwinter Nights is The Sims. The original The Sims game was meant specifically for the user to create their own stories and share them with the online Sims community of users. However, The Sims gradually developed tool sets that enabled its users to also manipulate the look of characters and items within the game, which was outside the bounds of the storytelling feature. The initial release of The Sims did not come with skinning software, which was used specifically for skinning or modification of the current character models and objects, however, once users began modifying these things with programs such as Adobe Photoshop the game developers began shipping follow-up versions that contained an additional program called Body Shop. This program allows user to modify their Sims more easily. There are still those who skin the “old-fashioned” way though, due to the fact that the Body Shop program has limitations. Once again, user interaction and participation as authors provided a longer shelf-life for the medium of video games.

Outside the video game industry, there is also the use of text-based programs which use co-authorship to continue a particular narrative and keep it interesting. MUDs are among this type of author-audience struggle. Someone authors or creates the initial environment and storyline within a MUD, but the audience/users keep the story going and can manipulate the objects within a story as they please, so long as they remain within any parameters set at the outset by the initial author. In this way, the narrative is ever-changing, always new, and belongs to the original author as well as the audience. Technically, these are not video games since they do not employ any graphics in the medium. MUDs belong within the print medium, but with the addition of the Internet to allow for intensive interaction and co-authorship.

Two quotes from Cover's article discuss this struggle:

“The very idea of the author as the central authority of a work is, as Foucault had pointed out, one that is regulated within culture, and one that is more recently put in question” and “The continuation of the mythos of the author into the digital age is one that is now to be located in what Manuel Castells (1997, 303) refers to as a pluralisation of sources of authority” (179).

Cover references two authors who agree with the idea that our current society is in the midst of an author-audience struggle that has come about primarily due to New Media in the above quotes. The Internet and video games have especially influenced this issue by not only allowing, but encouraging users to branch out from what they are initially given.

Personally, I feel the concept of an author-audience struggle will not need to be discussed much further into the future. It is a concept based on an archaic idea of property. Although I am a proponent of some intellectual property, (I don't particularly care for the idea of someone modifying one of my poems and then producing it as ours rather than leaving it alone and mine) I do feel the sense of community that co-authorship provides and the abundance of creativity that evolves from this cooperative effort are perfectly suited to New Media. I doubt co-authorship will be removed since it has had such success in the video game and Internet industries.

Works Cited:

Cover, Rob. "New Media Theory: Electronic Games, Democracy and Reconfiguring the Author -- Audience Relationship." Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 173-191. Academic Search premier. 29 April 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com

2009 Could Totally Happen Kurzweil Style: Blog #7

I chose to read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines Chapter Nine: 2009. I picked this particular chapter because I was interested in Kurzweil’s predictions about a time period that is now only 2 years away. Initially I had intended to read 2099, but since it is not likely that I will be around to see 2099 I decided to go to the opposite extreme.

The first section on actual computers is interesting and it’s what I’d like to focus on since there are so many new computer products being released right now that are comparable.

Already, we can see things like Bluetooth, which connect various gadgets wirelessly. Products that are Bluetooth compatible (and thus, are able to communicate with one another) include headsets, office equipment, laptops, handhelds, video game equipment, cell phones, automotive parts, etc. etc. This reminds me of Kurzweil’s “Interactivewear” cartoon at the beginning of the chapter where all the things a man is wearing communicate with each other and with the man himself. Our cars tell us when they are low on certain fluids or if parts are broken. Adding the ability for these things to talk to each other could provide an avenue to determine problems more quickly and find solutions to those problems easier.

Although I don’t think we are as close to ditching the traditional laptop just yet, they are getting much smaller. Sony has a Vaio that is small enough that you literally hold it in your hands to use it. This computer could be described as book-size or smaller, which is a description Kurzweil uses. Also, this computer does not have an external keyboard, but does have an integrated camera and microphone, and uses Flash memory rather than a “rotating platten” such as a hard drive or CD/DVD ROM (Kurzweil 189). Kurzweil’s 2009 computer is not so far off.

Kurzweil also discusses jewelry becoming computers. We now have watches with computers in them that are comparable to what Kurzweil describes. The Suunto company sells watches that keep track of a person’s heart rate, can be used as a personal trainer, a GPS, and measures a golf swing, among other things. I don’t see how it is much of a stretch to incorporate these things into earrings, necklaces, rings, bracelets, hair clips, etc. By 2009, perhaps my earrings will be able to talk to my Bluetooth headset and tell it that I need to lose a few pounds, and then the headset will send this information to my computer, which will then send me an email or perhaps simply tell me that I’m chubby and recommend a new diet and exercise regimen. Really, it boils down to simply combining these three technologies to produce the level of technical communication Kurzweil predicts. I believe that is not only realistically possible, but almost inevitable within the next 2 years.

Works Cited:

Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Remediating Print Poetry: Research #3

I chose to use Jay David Bolter and Richard Grussin’s, Remediation, as one of my New Media theorists for my Senior Project paper. The primary chapter I focused on was “Chapter 2: Mediation and Remediation” since it discusses using a medium to remediate other (generally older) media. A basic definition of remediation is using one medium for “reforming or improving on another” (Bolter 59). My project involves using digital images (film or photos for the most part) to enhance and augment print elegy. Since print writing is considered a medium, I feel this is a remediation of print poetry by digital imagery.

By combining print elegy with images I am able to create “imagetexts” which provide a more rich message than the picture or the words by themselves would (O'Gorman 31). Also, I am able to apply “hypericons” to provide a similar function, the difference being that hypericons have a multiplicity in their messages that imagetexts do not (O'Gorman 19). This would allow a more broad ability for interpreting a piece in various ways. Bolter describes the situation of remediation as, “arguing that at this extended historical moment, all current media function as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well” (55). The interpretation of print poetry within the framework of digital pictures and film gives print poetry a pictorial element that is becoming prevalent due to the pictorial nature of the internet and television. Since the trend appears to be heading toward having more pictures than words, print poetry needs to assimilate on some level. Also, the reflective quality poetry has on the culture and society producing it fits the idea that digitizing and remediating poetry is a natural step in its evolution. Our society is becoming more digital and more pictorial everyday, so our poetry should reflect this.

Bolter writes, “television, film, and now computer graphics threaten to remediate verbal text both in print and on the computer screen—indeed, to remediate text so aggressively that it may lose much of its historical significance” (57). I feel there are two ways to interpret print losing its “historical significance” (Bolter 57). One: print technology will become null if pictorial, digital technology continues to become more popular since the use of print will die out. Or, two: print will no longer require a socio-historic background knowledge since hyperlinks, pictures, and film will displace the necessity for research into the atmosphere of the time a print work was produced. Obviously, both possibilities could come about, but my personal lean is toward the second option. My efforts in digitizing elegy are centered around the idea that images will explain aspects of the poem that my words do not. A person can watch the digital elegy and understand the atmosphere surrounding the poem. He will see images of the person being memorialized, so when I describe the color of my grandmother’s hair in words an image will be associated with those words which shows her hair. If I describe a road in a rural Georgia town using vague, descriptive terms I can place the text on top of a picture of that road so the audience will more fully understand without having to look up background information explaining what I was talking about. In this way print is remediated without disappearing from the annals of history. I truly hope the first option does not come about, as I personally love print and would be saddened if it were forgotten.

The defining argument for remediation is this: “Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept promise of an older medium” (Bolter 60). This is similar to updates to your operating system. You are not really aware that something isn’t working up to par, but when you receive the newest fix you are made aware of the lack the previous version had and generally do not want to revert back to it. Media simply do the same thing on a deeper level. This is not a system problem with a computer, but a communication problem with society and since human beings communicate through various media, sometimes it becomes necessary to “fix” the old forms of communication or to re-invent them with the new societal norms in mind.

Works Cited:

Bolter, Jay David, Richard Grussin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.

O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media Critical Theory and the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2006.

I Wanna Be a Hacker: Blog #6

After reading the chapter, “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” from Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and The Bazaar, I find myself more interested in the “folklore” of computers and the internet. I knew some basic facts about the MIT lab and ARPAnet from lower level Information Technology classes I’ve taken, but none gave such an interesting viewpoint of the happenings of the people behind these inventions. Raymond describes the events that lead to today’s internet and personal computer in a way that brings the whole history to life. I can easily relate to the Free Software Foundation hackers and their fight to keep some software from becoming proprietary.

For years now I have heard reference to Unix machines, but never personally worked within that OS. I knew that Linux was based off of Unix simply because of the similar sound in the names and befriending a few hackers in high school. However, not once did I guess that there had been such a prevalent social and political war going on within the hacker community. The idea that there are people who have the wherewithal to break from tradition so completely and try their own way is amazing. It seems the computer, and its many tendrils of succession, have produced the largest organized group of creative, free-thinkers to come along since the Hippie generation. The difference here is that hackers seem to lean toward useful application in their creative, free-thinking rather than merely being creative, free-thinkers. The software programs, operating systems, and free, redistributable source code produced by these minds are consistently useful, more efficient, more stable, and better overall than most commercial parallels.

In the social sphere, it appears that hackers were the pioneers of internet community, a sense of teamwork that was unprecedented, and a desire to share and share alike. Today, I can relate to these ideals primarily through my online gaming experiences as well as chatting. I have become rather close friends with multiple people I never had the opportunity to meet due to their far location. I have experienced teamwork in the form of group fighting in games, but this also manifested itself in one particularly interesting experience. At some point in one of the myriad online games I’ve played, I got to see a “guild” tutoring one of its members in Algebra in the game. This was a regular event since the tutee was having trouble in his Algebra class and apparently a few of the other members were math people. I was blown away by this “teamwork” and sharing of knowledge to help someone fully unknown outside of the game. I know, not the same level of teamwork involved with creating an operating system with multiple people around the world pitching in, but this action being proper within the gaming world stems directly from the hacker sense of community.

In the political sphere, I find it interesting that hackers banded together to help stop two political movements which would have fettered computer users: the Clipper proposal and the "Communications Decency Act." In both instances there was a physical manifestation of the digital hacker community in an effort to keep government from having too much control over computer encryption and the internet. The fact that this sense of community is so strong that it can overrule political and governmental actions is remarkable.

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After rereading my post, I feel I primarily summarized Raymond and gave my personal opinion about the hacker community. To be honest, I'm not sure I know in what way or how to analyze this piece. It is history from the mouth of one who was there (for the most part). I wasn't even alive when a large part of this history was happening. Since we watched the first half of Revolution OS in class I have a little bit of prior knowledge about the subject, but not a lot. It is enough to know that most of the players in this history agree about how the personal computer and the internet developed.

For the most part, I feel as though I should just stare, mouth agape, at this history and glory in the wonder of how it all happened. These days, most people take the internet for granted. My three youngest brothers were born into an already existent internet society where anything that is important is on the internet. I can still remember the first time I accessed the internet on my own personal computer. The sense of freedom that came from such an endless supply of knowledge and communication was exhilirating to say the least. It is imagining not having it that creates wonder in me, because life would be so much more difficult and cumbersome. To have to go back to solely using paper mail, to have to actually speak to someone rather than message them, to be cut-off from the possibility of knowing people in other countries, to have to type papers on a typewriter and look up books with the Dewey Decimal system.... It is a terrifying prospect.

I suppose I didn't really do anything more than add more of my opinion just now. Oh well. Apparently this is what the history of computers inspires in me, so I'm just gonna run with it. ;P

Works Cited:
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Cambridge: O'Reilly and Associates, 1999.

Sometimes a "Story" Isn't a Story at All: Blog #5

Focusing on the section entitled “Computer Scientists as Storytellers” in Chapter 2 of Janet Murray’s book, Hamlet on the Holodeck; I am almost disturbed by the prospect of stories no longer truly being stories. Yes, the interactive quality is interesting in its use as a videogame. I do want to be able to “sense” flying in "Placeholder," but I am leery of being so completely inured in a story through the tactile that I am able to change the outcome (Murray 61).

Towards the end of the section, Murray describes what a movie might be like in the year 2097 with all the various techno gadgets included that she describes previously in the section. She envisions a Holodeck like quality, but I do not see the outcome as that. In the Holodeck Janeway is playing a character in a set story. She steps into a role. She can feel all the things the character would feel, but she doesn’t have effect on the story itself. Murray’s “holodeck” is different: “We would be able to move the images,” “We would meet characters within this world who would sense our presence and converse with us,” “We would enter the story, and the plot would change according to our actions” (Murray 63). This description is not really of a story so much as of a virtual reality. Stories have specific beginnings, middles, and endings which require only the specific characters given. If some random Joe Schmoe steps into the story and does not take up the role of one of these specified characters, then it is no longer a story. What happens is the same as me walking into a historic romance novel dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and my women’s equality attitude; this spells disaster, not interactive story.

Somehow, I am irritated by the possibility of my film experience denigrating into Murray’s vision. I don’t want to tell the story; I want to be told the story. If I wanted to be in control of what was happening in a virtual setting, then I wouldn’t watch a movie or read a book I would play an open-ended RPG. I take no issue with adding tactile experiences to a set story. I feel that is the same as surround sound in the movie theater. I don’t even mind feeling as though I am really in the setting. 3-D glasses attempted to do the same thing. I simply do not feel Murray is still describing a story when the story changes based on my existence within its boundaries. I want to be immersed, but I do not want to be in control. Movies, books, and videogames for pleasure are traditionally used as escapism. I cannot escape if I am still required to make decisions.

These are separate types of entertainment. When I want to choose where to go and what to do in a setting outside the one I live in, I play a video game. When I want to simply experience or imagine, I read or watch fiction. Personally, I do not think these things can commingle and maintain the title of story or game. Murray's vision is something new and should be categorized as such.

The closest thing I can compare this to from my personal experience is the Role Playing option in World of Warcraft. You can choose to create a character on one of their RP servers. The idea is that everyone on the server wishes to Role-Play constantly and they get irritated if you break out of character, because it ruins the experience for others.

Hannah Marney got me try this with her. She has a love of text-based RPGs, so this option created images for her to associate with her role-playing. I could never get the hang of it, specifically because of the reasons I outlined above. She felt like she was writing her own story and enjoyed doing so. It was as if it still unfolded without her prior knowledge, accept she knew what she intended to do herself; however, since she played with other living “characters,” what was going to happen remained unknown.

I did not particularly care for this type of “storytelling.” I was required to come up with witty things to say, actions to emote, and a personality to act out. I had to write an entire life for a person that would never exist for anyone else. There was no way for me to compare my perception of my character to someone else’s perception of my character, since mine was the only one that existed or mattered. The procedural nature of the character design allowed me to say “No, my character would never do that,” and so she never did.

This is so different from discussing how someone else views Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a character. Anyone who has read Hamlet knows what Hamlet did, knows what Hamlet thought about doing, and watched his inner turmoil change him. He was not a flat character. My WoW character is flat. Perhaps that is the major issue. If you step into a story world and are not a character in the story, you are flat and 2-D no matter how many tactiles you have to tell your brain otherwise. Murray herself describes something similar when she discusses playing in the ALIVE program at MIT. She cannot fully accept the virtual reality of the situation in the “magic mirror” because she sees herself in the mirror, in her own “ordinary clothes” (Murray 62). It required being able to watch someone else interacting with the ALIVE characters for the virtual reality to really work. The voyeur aspect is a major part of any good story. People want to be in the story as someone else, or not at all.


Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997.

I Learned it From my Computer... Blog #4

In Nelson’s Computer Lib/ Dream Machine there is a focus on education needing to move past its overly structured, unthinking roots. Nelson’s primary issue with education is the mind set it produces in children which follows them into adulthood, “Not becoming involved with the subject, the student grabs for rote payoff rather than insight” (309). This relates to the computer through the use of computers as a tool to teaching. The idea is that computers are “cold” and “inhuman,” whereas teachers are “warm” and “human.” This is a stereotype that is not held up by much factual or statistical information. Overall, the use of the computer as teacher enables the student to become more intimate with the subject he is studying rather than focusing on completing busy work to make the desired grade; actually studying a subject rather than learning it long enough to get through a course and promptly forgetting it upon completion.

As of right now, the most consistent use of computers in the classroom is merely as a teaching aid or tool. The thought process for this type of use, related to the computer, is the same as using chalk on a chalkboard or marker on a whiteboard; the computer is considered merely a communication tool between teacher and student or as a more convenient way to give multiple choice tests. It is now also used more often for research, but again, this is similar to the use of a book or journal. There is little time devoted to truly experimenting with the other tool provided by computers: possible artificial intelligence to educate.

Looking up “artificial intelligence in education” on Google search produced quite a few hits. Most collegiate institutions now provide online classes in which the student works (for the most part) at his own pace, takes part in online forum discussions with other students, and uses AI based computer tutorials to help work through certain subjects without the direct aid of a human teacher. One such site is http://www.aaai.org/. This site specializes in improving “the teaching and training of AI practitioners,” among other AI related subjects. A page on the site related specifically to AI education discusses the continual, albeit gradual, movement toward employing AI directly in schools.

Why Not Use Pictures??? Research #2

In Marcel O’Gorman’s “E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities,” Chapter 2, he discusses various topics about the need for the “Republic of Scholars” to develop beyond the papyrus and “ink interface” it clings to so completely. Our technology currently enables us to cite work online via links to the work (so long as it is available online and not in an exclusive database), yet I still have a MLA citation at the bottom of this blog. Perhaps a compromise would be to keep the citation, yet make the title (within the citation) a link to the book on Amazon? Although I feel this development of the Republic of Scholars into a more digitally acceptable form is inevitable, I still think it is a long time coming. Writing has remained the same way since its inception; changing it will be quite a feat.

Moving away from the “Republic” and its changes, I’d like to discuss “imagetexts” since they are more relevant to my Senior Project work on digital elegy. O’Gorman describes the interplay that happens when placing text and pictures together as an imagetext. The words and the pictures each have their own message, but they also create a new message through their combination. A constant struggle exists, but by using the pictures and text specifically to compliment each other, the combined message overcomes the individual messages of the pictures and text, and creates a deeper, richer meaning and experience for the audience and the author when used as a digital elegy. By combining images with text, the need for historic knowledge of the culture and society the work was produced in lessens. Pictures can tell us what we need to know about the history associated with the text. My imagetexts, digital elegy, will be the layering of literary elegy on top of digital photographs and film in the hope that the literary will be enhanced by the digital. I want the subject of the elegy to become more alive to the audience through the addition of significant images.

The other image related term O’Gorman focuses on in Chapter 2 is “hypericons.” In class we discussed bathroom signs (basic figures of men and women to denote who can enter which bathroom in a public place) as possibly being the beginning of hypericons. These signs, as well as many other types of signs, have a basic idea associated with them, and it is just one idea not many. Hypericons have many possible ideas associated with them. They require some interpretation on the part of the viewer and cannot be lumped into one category or another. Generally speaking, hypericons are saturated with possible ideas and meanings that are related to the image. The key difference between an imagetext and a hypericon is the lack of text in a hypericon; the textuality of a hypericon is entirely interpretive for the viewer rather than being a layering of text onto a related image. The first picture in Chapter 2, “The Eye Socket,” by Stephen Gibb, can be viewed as a hypericon in that it radiates multiple possible interpretations. (I would have provided a link to the specific picture, but I cannot find one on the net. I assume Stephen Gibb’s artist site, linked above, will have this picture in the archive once it is complete.) We see the electrical socket, the eye, the plug… but the combination of images gives off various messages. My personal interpretation is based off of the thumbnail version of the image (on the first page of Chapter 2) since you cannot see the eye. To me, the electrical outlet already displays a certain fear and disgust at the idea of being “plugged.” The shape of the individual holes in the socket look slightly skewed, implying feeling and personification without the eye pictured below it. Once I looked at the full image I was amazed at how much more disturbing the image became. This painting epitomizes hypericons in its ability to project thoughts, ideas, and meanings to its audience without the aid of words.

The chapter as a whole was eye opening, to use a pun. The idea that images can communicate better than words has been glossed over in the past. However, the advent of the internet requires our societies movement toward pictorial communication. We began with merely television, but now everything we mentally consume is available on the net and we don’t like it if it doesn’t include pictures, animation, or some variant of eye candy. If pictures are what we continue producing, then pictures will become the norm for communication regardless of the desires of the Republic of Scholars.



O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media Critical Theory and the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2006.

I'm a cyborg... Aren't you? Blog #3

I’m going to be lazy this go round and not talk about Donna Haraway’s cyborg in “Cyborgs and Symbionts” so much as Chris Gray’s dissemination of Haraway’s cyborg in “Cyborgology” since that makes more sense to me.

The most striking appeal Gray’s piece held for me was the idea that I am a cyborg. Forget Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rendition of the Terminator as a mostly robotic, language disabled, tough guy. The real cyborg is your little sister who just got a flu shot to help her body fight off viruses. It didn’t remotely occur to me that a cyborg could be something other than a bizarre conglomeration of metal appendages and organic fluids, but the way Gray defines a cyborg (which is taken directly from Haraway’s more theory driven definition) files most human beings of this day and age into the category of cyborg. I like that idea. It’s somehow comforting to think that a cyborg is not an alien being, but merely a different variation of the same things humans have always been; a new twist on the same old organisms employing the same old brain power.

However, despite my claim to discuss Gray and not Haraway, I feel it is important to address Haraway’s ideas about “Gaia” since they relate to the idea of cyborgs being something other than human, but not alien. Haraway describes James Lovelock’s idea of Gaia as, “the whole earth was a dynamic, self-regulating, homeostatic system;” (Haraway xiii), which fits nicely into the cyborg myth in that it describes the Earth as something that is an entire living entity functioning off of the efforts of other entities. The cyborg does the same thing. As human beings attempting to become better than our “natural” existence precludes for us, we must employ the efforts of other things, primarily technology, to extend and augment ourselves.

Gray furthers this idea when he states, “There is no one kind of cyborg” (Gray 2). There is no one kind of person or ailment or injury, so the ways that people become cyborgs are as varied as the issues that drive them to look for answers in technology. Medical science is perhaps the most advanced and varied specifically because people want to fix things with their bodies that traditional medicine cannot. The more aesthetic and mental cyborgs are just around the corner. Right now we make ourselves cyborgs to extend life and make it more physically pleasant while we are alive, but it is only a matter of time before people begin to make themselves cyborgs to enhance appearance and thought processes. Already we have plastic surgery where we insert plastic pieces to make are butts and boobs and chins bigger. How much further is it really to have a plug put in the back of your head so that you can direct link to the internet? Technically speaking, human beings are currently using medical technology to make life more convenient. What is more convenient than looking up movie listings in your head rather than having to wait for your computer to boot up and access a wireless internet connection? As scary as it is, cyborg development seems almost inevitable.

Works Cited:

Gray, Chris. “Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms.” The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Haraway, Donna. “Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order.” The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Being Digital and the VOD: Blog #2

In Part 3 of Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte discuss something called VOD or video-on-demand. Negroponte implies that VOD or some variant of it will become the norm. He actually predicted the end of video rental stores entirely within the next 10 years. Since the book was written in 1995 that prediction has not entirely come true as we still have a local Blockbuster in just about every major city across America. However, Negroponte was not far off the mark. Today we now see Blockbuster commercials that are advertising the ability to order movies online and receive them in the mail, while maintaining the option of renting movies directly from the physical store.

This turn Blockbuster has taken is due in part to the success of NetFlix, who offers only online ordering of movies and does not present the option of a physical location. Also, there are a few websites that now offer the ability to pay with a credit card and simply download and watch a movie directly on your computer, such as MovieFlix.com and MovieLink.com. The change Blockbuster has made is ironic because Negroponte mentions how former Blockbuster chairman, H. Wayne Huizenga claimed that “87 million American homes took fifteen years to have a $30 billion investment in VCRs and that Hollywood has such a big stake in selling him cassettes that it would not dare enter into VOD agreements” (Negroponte 173). Obviously this statement has proved to be false. VCRs are swiftly being replaced by DVD players, TiVo, and faster computers. Also, Apple has come out with the AppleTV which allows users to transmit videos from their iPod to their TV.

These various items lead me to discuss Negroponte’s points about asynchronous viewing. Basically the idea is that Television has required massive amounts of people to watch any particular show or movie only at the time it is being broadcast, thus synchronously. The newer technologies discussed above are allowing people to watch shows and movies at their leisure, thus asynchronously. I can now decide to take a class at 8 p.m. and not worry about missing American Idol because I’ve programmed my TiVo to record all instances of American Idol for me, thus allowing me to watch the program when I get home or whenever I happen to feel like watching it.

The future Negroponte predicted for television, VCRs, and video rental stores is not quite here, but it is definitely coming. Perhaps if he had given a 20 year time span rather than a 10 year time span he’d have been right on the money. Regardless, the way we think about viewing media has already met his expectations and that is exciting to me.

Works Cited:
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

"Digital Expression" on Wired Magazine: Research #1

I've done my first bit of research on an article from Wired Magazine called "Digital Expression". This article, written by Nicholas Negroponte, discusses how computing is moving out of the realm of being solely related to math and science and into the realm of artistic expression. Negroponte compares computing development to the development of photography in that it is now being moved into the hands of more creative individuals rather than just scientific individuals.

The primary example used, other than photography, is that of music. Music has “three diverse but complementary perspectives” (Negroponte 1), which relate to the scientific via a digital signal, the interpretive via discerning how music makes us feel or react, and the creative via the idea that music can be used as a tool for artistic expression. Negroponte’s point here is that computers are now able to provide points of access to all three of the elements of music listed above. With such a high level of versatility computers are quickly becoming capable of allowing many points of access for other types of media as well. Music was simply the beginning for MIT’s Media Lab. This program, founded primarily by Negroponte, has continued to do various research involving bits and atoms, digital life, and research programs such as Scratch, which is a “programming toolkit” made specifically for children to use in order to create interactive stories, games and art through the use of graphics, image, and sound manipulation.

The conglomeration of using graphics, image, and sound to create new styles of art is the basic thrust of all multimedia projects. With people like Negroponte working to create newer and easier ways to access these mediums it is just a matter of time before there is at least one person in every home who uses digital technology to express themselves, be they age 5 or 50. Negroponte states, “The means and messages of multimedia will become a blend of technical and artistic achievement” (1). This blending of imperatives, as Negroponte calls them, is the core idea behind New Media. Computers and all their various programs are becoming geared towards artistic expression as well as technological advancement. New Media is all about using computers to create and express ourselves with the new technologies becoming available to us. The fact that we can now combine various medias with traditional types of artistic expression is amazing. We are able to take many art forms and enhance or augment them with the technology multimedia provides. One such art form is that of digital photography enhanced by photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop. There are now even websites devoted to this particular type of photography such as, Digital Photography School, which has links to tips on taking better digital photos. The website, Digital Blasphemy, actually focuses on creating entirely digital images without the aid of a camera. The images on this particular site are actually 3-D rendered images created with Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Poser 6, and so on. The creator of the site, Ryan Bliss, is self-taught which demonstrates the idea that computers will and are enabling people to express themselves more thoroughly through much more technical avenues.

In class we’ve been discussing Negroponte’s book, Being Digital. This book has an example in it that Negroponte also uses in this article; that of the mid 19th century teacher being fully capable of substituting for a teacher today. The purpose of this example is to illustrate how slowly education has changed and to point out how it is beginning to pick up a bit of speed. “We are moving away from a hard-line mode of teaching that caters primarily to compulsive, serialist children, toward one that is more porous and draws no lines between art and science or right brain and left brain “ (Negroponte 2). Comparing this statement with Negroponte’s statement about multimedia blending technical and artistic achievement shows how we are becoming more comfortable with the idea of being ambidextrous in the way we think, work, and create. There has generally been the assumption that you are either a math person or an English person, a technical person or an artistic person. Rarely do we find someone who claims to be good at Math and English. However, we are being pushed towards that end by enabling greater levels of creativity, but requiring some technical/mathematical aptitude to accomplish it with the computer as our primary tool. Vice versa, Negroponte points out how computer hackers write programs that have deeper meaning and aesthetic values that reflect their makers. Writing computer code is a highly technical and mathematical pursuit, but apparently the artistic and creative flair can be seen within them as easily as the technical can be seen in a digital film.

Works Cited:

Negroponte, Nicholas. “Digital Expression” Wired Dec 1994. 31 Jan 2007.

The Medium IS the Message: Blog #1

After reading Marshall Mcluhan’s The Medium is the Message I find I’ve completely changed my opinion on how a medium effects its content.

Content is defined as:
“2. something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts: a poetic form adequate to a poetic content.” You can look it up yourself at Dictionary.com or go to the page Here.

Content is a fairly easily understood concept. It can be applied to older technologies such as speech, print, and film as equally as it can be applied to the newer technologies of Flash movies, blogging, and websites in general. Since the content itself is static, the medium becomes the variable agent.

Medium is defined as:
“6. an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished: Words are a medium of expression.

7. one of the means or channels of general communication, information, or entertainment in society, as newspapers, radio, or television.”
You can look it up yourself at Dictionary.com or go to the page Here.

The first definition of the word medium is how I have understood medium in the past. However, the second definition fits more snugly into McLuhan’s definition of medium since it relates directly to human communication and interaction via the vehicle of technology. It is easy to imagine the difference between a written play, an acted play, and a film play. The written play requires pure imagination, the theatrical play relies heavily upon a human being’s speech abilities as well as the set, and the same play produced in film may use certain special effects not available to the previous two mediums simply because of the level of technology. This illustrates the major impact the medium has upon its content.

With medium’s ability to change its message, we must begin to focus on how important media is becoming in the world today. McLuhan discusses technology as neither positive nor negative in its uses, but positive or negative from one type of technology to another. This is the difference between a bomb and a book. I am fully capable of writing a book that is anti-abortion in its message, however I am also capable of bombing an abortion clinic to get my message across. Obviously it is the technology that provides either a positive or negative effect on how the rest of humanity will receive this message. Thus, the medium becomes the message.

Things You Wish You Didn't Know About Me...

I hate chunky stuff in creamy stuff!!! Like fruit in the bottom yogurt and chunky peanut butter. It's bloody disturbing! I love really horribly cheesy horror and sci-fi movies. Particularly those w/ bad dialogue. I bellydance. Ummm..... I'm done here. Kthx.