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.)

"Has led to" and "Inevitablility"

I found the Williams reading very interesting, especially together with the Nardi/O’Day chapter from earlier this month about inevitability.

Both readings have made me really stop and consider how I think, not only about technology but about everything. The discussion of "inevitability" in the Nardi/O'Day reading, which I discussed earlier on my blog, made me realize how often I have heard people use that phrase in relation to technology.

This reading made me stop and look at how often people say that technology has "led to" a change or that it has had "effected" society. I'm guilty of it too. The comparison of the various statements on page 11 especially brought to the forefront how familiar these phrases are, and how insufficient.

After reading, I thought about how I always thought that new technologies like the internet, broadband, social networks, had all "changed" society and how it works. It is true that society has changed, but as Williams said, you have to think whether the technology brought about a change or whether the change brought about the technology. I think this is the case with the internet - it was developed for a specific need, first with DARPA and then with universities. Out of that it developed into a wider social tool. Websites like facebook and myspace have "changed" how we keep in touch with each other, but really they are responses to the already changing technology and communication systems in place.

Then again, I don't think it's fair to rule out technology changing society as well. It may be true that sites like facebook and myspace were responses to the way people used technology to communicate, but they also exacerbate these ways of communication to the point that people's communication and social skills both adapt and evolve into these new methods and no longer are as suitable for other methods of communication. The same can be said of the inevitability of these systems coming about, as I discussed in the past blog entry.


Together, the two articles have made me look around with fresh eyes, and I plan to keep this in mind in the future when looking at news and new technologies.

ideology

Post a definition of ideology and a short discussion of how you see ideology at work around you.

"Ideology is a term developed in the Marxist tradition to talk about how cultures are structured in ways that enable the group holding power to have the maximum control with the minimum of conflict."

(Find notes from last class. write more about how it functions and what it is.)

We can see ideology at work all around us, most often in teh context of political party platforms and ideals, but we can also see it in smaller places.

Within online media, there are a number of different ideologies. One says that you should conserve your property, and if you allow it to be obtained freely you are giving away a large part of your income. Another says that it is inevitable (that word!) to have tv shows, movies, and music get online for "free" (illegally), and they try to *shape* how it is being obtained rather than prevent it from happening. Companies like Disney/ABC offer their entire season of shows online to be watched for free on their website. This way they can still sell ads and control the distribution of it.

On the other extreme is the RIAA, working with/on behalf of the record industry. They are almost comically fanatical about trying to stop music trading. Even though they have (in a questionably legal way) strong armed money out of a number of poor students, they haven't had much success in stopping online music trading. Instead of trying to stop the -- not quite "inevitable," since it's already happened. It is like they are standing trying to plug a dam that has a ten foot wide hole in it by dropping bubble gum into the water flowing away. Instead, they should be trying to embrace the change and shape the direction the technology goes, so that they can find a way to benefit from the release or trade of free music in a legal way.

babble babble (techology is a good thing, "inevitability" is a bad thing)

I think the chapters in the Information Ecologies book was interesting. I agree that more people should join the debate about technology and where it is headed, instead of finding it inevitable, even if they don't know all the issues. If they don't make an effort, they will never learn enough to be a real participant.

The authors complain about how the two extremes, the technophiles and technophobes (dystopians), take the lead in the debates. I think this is normal and can be seen in debate in all topics, not just technology. The extremes have the most vehement opinions, and often are more well read up on the issues they feel so strongly about.

I would say that there is definitely a disconnect generated by online relationships, and this can be seen from both the side of the techophile and the technophobe. My friends and I have blogs, and we keep in touch that way. Through blogs, and to a lesser extent, facebook, I can keep up to date with people without ever talking to them. When my mom asks, "How is Cameron doing these days?" I can tell her that she spent a semester in France and loved it, and that she's now back in the DC area finishing up her last couple of semesters. All this, even though I haven't spoken to Cameron directly beyond a couple of comments on her blog in the past three years.

As portrayed in the video clip, social networking online can be seen as inevitable, when really it has been created by people. Looking back, it is easy to say that a network like this would become widely used. I don't think it was entirely inevitable. It is not inevitable that a project like Wikipedia would appear either - it took massive organization of a group of people with a vision to set it up and have enough passion to keep it going.

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Describe how you can change how techology is being used: (How can *you* influence?)

Roadshow. encourages others to interact with techology more often.
I think at home I can influence how techology is used by encouraging my parents/siblings to understand the techologies they use better. I think it would be interesting to try to influence how techology is used in classes, at least my classes, at CMU. I love the internet, and I love having computers around, but it is true that they encourage people to not pay attention. Synchron-eyes doesn't work. Clearly something else is needed. This isn't really what they want us to look at.