Screen Grabs: The Digital Dialect and New Media Theory

There were several things in this article that I found very interesting, but the one I think is most important to discuss, and that we haven't discussed before, is the idea of "bit rot."

It comes up on page XX in the introduction, when he is defending having published a book instead of releasing it online. He says, "Nothing ages faster and become inaccessible quicker than electronic media." It's true, you can look at even just the storage that has evolved and what is now obsolete - 5 1/4" floppy disks, 3 1/2" floppy disks, zip disks - thought to be the next new technology and actually installed in computers, now never seen. CD-ROMs became pretty standard, but that's now becoming displaced by DVD-ROMs.

It really is a problem in terms of getting people to embrace technological copies of things. People are happy to try new technologies, but they don't want to use them for anything lasting, like books or music. People are happy to use new technologies and hype them up, but if you ask them to invest in technologies that they're not sure are steady. VHS and DVD have been embraced, though VHS is dying. But people won't invest in Blu-ray or HD-DVD except the people who really want to be at the forefront and have the best new gadgets, because one will triumph over the other at some point.

My dad, who does photography, runs into this problem. Negatives can fade or break, but people know how to take care of them. However, if you store digital photography on cds, the CDs will fade after a while and people don't know the lifetime of them. On top of that, you may save the file in a format that becomes obsolete, and you won't be able to retrieve that picture again, whereas the negatives and enlargers have been used for the past hundred years, and will continue to be used in the same way as they have for a long time to come.

Some systems are backwards compatible, but to build a less clunky, more efficient computer system you need to take out the backwards compatibility. Windows XP upset a lot of people because it wasn't backwards compatible to Windows 95 or 98. New game systems like X-Box 360 weren't backwards compatible, which upset a lot of people, so they released individual patches for individual past games.

It really is a barrier to embrace of technology as a whole, to assure people that they can embrace technologies even when it's going to be replaced sometime in the future.

Harry Potter and the Internet Meme

I think it would be interesting to discuss in class how the "Dumbledore is Gay" announcement was spread so quickly around the web, and how it organically (or virally) spread from location to location before it even was picked up by mainstream media. It was really interesting to watch how long it took to reach some places and how quickly others, kind of like an earthquake - an epicenter and gradually spreading ripples spreading out from it.

digital photography

I think digital photography is an interesting new technology - I've been following the evolution of the technology pretty much since it became commercial, because my dad does fine art photography and has been trying the technology since it came out. The first digital camera he got was 1.2 megapixels, which is less than my phone has now. He now has a 13 megapixel camera, which allows him to have the picture stretched and printed at 11inchesx14inches without pixilization, so it is actually a reasonable substitution for traditional photography.

One of my dad's dislikes for digital photography is that you can photoshop it to take out problems - kind of like painting. With a painting, you can "edit" while you paint to take out things like telephone poles from photos of beaches, etc. whereas you had to actually find the picture with photography. Now, you can *take* that picture and just make it "look right" to you.

Photoshop is fairly easy to do - websites like fark.com have photoshop contests every day that show really realistic (or not, depending on the contest) photos. Something Awful does photoshop phridays with similar ideas. It is a problem when one of these images are taken seriously and spread around the web (you can typically see examples on snopes.com of images that started as jokes but were then taken seriously).

An example of a fark.com photoshop:

(the original)

and

This movie I thought was also very interesting in terms of ease of photo manipulation - becoming easier every day.

Games and Noise

I thought the point about interpreting noise and decoding messages was really interesting, because I used to be really interested in cryptography. My interest really started with Alan Turing, one of my personal idols, who helped build the machine that decrypted the German codes during World War II. This is a good example of the Maximum Entropy Formalism, where you leave your mind most open to ideas to find the right solution. In this type of encryption, each letter is not only encrypted, it not necessarily encrypted in the same way as the letter previous. If they had expected the letters to follow the patterns they already knew, they would never have decrypted them.

I also thought Johnson's points about the good parts of video games are important to understand. Especially the feedback you get when playing. It made me think about these games aimed at children, which test and develop reading and spelling skills, and how those games are probably better in a lot of ways to teach children on their own than just books, since they'll get immediate feedback. I know a lot of parents worry about kids using computers too much, because they think they are mindless and have no good qualities.

I played games like that when I was younger, and probably they helped me understand things like homophones faster, because they were fun. Instead of just reading in a book (not that I disliked books, I actually loved them), you were matching up words to clear a carrot patch and get points in a game. The games are way more advanced and helpful now. I think it would be really interesting to look at all these games again and study what qualities are most helpful.

Unfinished Business

I think Lunenfeld's discussion of how new media encourages "unfinished" is really interesting.

I know I encounter it a lot in fandom. Books like Harry Potter have an entire world beyond the actual written text. People continue the stories between books (There are a few hundred "Book Seven"s online). They also rewrite the books with a twist - I've read stories where the Sorting Hat doesn't listen to Harry's request not to be in Slytherin, and famously (well, internet-famously) some Harmonians, fans who think Harry and Hermione should have gotten together, rewrote book Six by taking the text of the book and just changing any scene where Hermione and Ron get closer to getting together into either Harry/Hermione scenes or Hermione encouraging Ron to stay with Lavender.

Some authors are fighting this trend - Anne Rice is fully against the idea of fanfic and her lawyers send cease and desist letters to any archive that has stories based on her characters. Others embrace this new way for fans to interact with the work - J. K. Rowling likes fan fiction and online communities about the stories (though she cannot officially allow it for copyright reasons).

The continuation of the fan base online can allow for new projects. Firefly, a series on Fox that was cancelled after half a season, got a big screen movie. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now being continued in a comic series.

I just think it's really interesting that where series were only "unfinished" if it was a series, made up of "finished" books, except for a few fans who went to conventions or wrote stories for fanzines, but now the internet has allowed for an extended community of people who extend the stories beyond the official end.

Presentations

I really enjoyed these presentations. Seeing several case studies helped me understand information ecologies, particularly the ones who organized their presentations into those categories. I think it's a concept that is really best explained by example rather than just text.

The presentations were also very interesting on another level, bringing up ideas beyond just the information ecologies. I've grown to really enjoy Nardi and O'Day, many of their chapters make me reconsider the world around me. I liked the idea of the gardeners, and I like to think I'm a gardener in many situations, though I know I sometimes need to slow down. I do make the effort to explain, so in many situations I can end up in that position.

I also found the idea of the dysfunctional ecologies very intriguing. It's one of many situations where the people who interact directly with the technology are not considered, just the larger picture. It's kind of a not seeing the trees for the forest situation - yes, the hospital could be benefited by having this video and audio footage, both for the patients and for the neurosurgeon to be able to help on more surgeries. (This could be used for situations where a specialist lives far away from the hospital as well. I hate to bring up an example from Grey's Anatomy, but in that show they once brought in a satellite link to the specialist on a certain surgery who lived in another country.) They manage to forget the major privacy issue and the rights and comforts of the surgeons.

I enjoyed working on this case study - I really liked the chapter we were assigned. Looking at the feedback for our group, I wish we had been a bit shorter (I tried my best to be concise - I think my part might have been too short?) and that I could have shown it. After reading the feedback, I think my idea of showing Virtual Magic Kingdom may not have helped, since most people wondered what a text based world looks like, or wondered how it works without graphics. (I liked the line in the book where they said it was like being in a novel, but I think I didn't present that idea as clearly as I could have. I also think it's something where you can't visualize it unless you've played a game like that before.)