Author Archives: killab

Hey everyone, here is our video!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xXrF_nQJME[/youtube]

We hope you enjoy it.

The reading for 3/24 gave a really good history of Wikipedia and the major players in the creation and how it got where it is today. I liked how we got the background of Wales and Sanger their stories in The Hive article. I found it interesting that Sanger goal for the project was to create an encyclopedia based on the criteria of wisdom-of-crowds. Also I noticed the comment of Wales saying he was in charge yet stepping away and making Sanger manage the whole project. It reminded me when start-ups get big and the business savvy creator doesn’t totally want to part with the project so he stays around still having a high title, yet having someone else do the hard dirty work.

The one thing I am still wondering about is how the Wikipedia non-profit creates enough money? My guess if you were a member and an avid reader and contributer you would maybe donate annually?

Also what I find interesting and puzzling is this sense of community? I guess their is a new rule where consensus has to be held by the community before deleting an entry? And I was a little confused on what authority the Moderators had.

I remember when I first went on Wikipedia I found it very fun. I only ever read stuff and I haven’t written anything. Also another fond memory of Wikipedia is when boys in my senior class of high school wrote a hilarious entry on our high school’s page which mind you was somewhat derogatory. It would get deleted and they would keep putting it up. It was pretty funny at the time 2nd semester senior year.

In the reading for today I found all of them to be very interesting and interconnected and I liked that a lot. “Why I Blog” reading by Andrew Sullivan pointed out that blogging has become a platform to critique journalists. He also points out that blogging provides a discussion and debate between the blogger’s opinion and of his readers. He identifies blogging as a new form of writing because it is written thought and dialogue within a persons mind of a certain subject and because of it’s rapid publishing. From this article I gained a new knowledge of why blogging is so important to society and the people who write and read blogs.

Jay Rosen’s blog, “Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press” presents the reader a diagram to understand journalism in the U.S. The diagram (from Daniel C. Hallin book “The Uncensored War”) is configured in a donut shape and the inside hole of the donut is labeled “sphere of consensus” then the middle part is “sphere of legitimate debate” and then outside the donut shape is “sphere of deviance.” Rosen goes on explaining all these spheres that usually journalists write in the “sphere of legitimate debate” yet however he says this is not always true, but however if written in another sphere it is usually considered not to be good journalism. The Internet has weakened the press by the availability for people online to find people who have similar values and interests they share information and “trade impressions and realize their number” creating a new “sphere of legitimate debate” in contrast with the “Big Media.” This is what journalists call the “echo chamber” where “bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand.”

Basically what happening is the “authority of the press to assume consensus” is weakened when a new group of people define and set the terms for legitimate debate and “when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.” Rosen three word definition of understanding internet affects in politics and media is “Audience Atomization Overcome.”

Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” touched on the affect of the internet on newspapers. I thought it was very interesting how he explained how the printing press revolutionized books and made literature available to masses around the world. He continues to say that the internet is revolutionary like the printing press. So one may ask why do we still have the newspaper? As he talks about in his blog how newspaper companies began brainstorming in 1990 of how they would adopt to the internet. Today the newspaper prints way less than it use to because of he cost. For example the New York Times doesn’t print everything one can subscribe to the NY Times online and get everything for a mircopayment. He also makes it clear it that “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

These readings made me think of instant media and how especially in the U.S. the internet and access to rapid information formulates our society and our demands of time differently than other parts of the world with limited internet rapid information access.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic. n.p., July. 1945. Web. 25, February. 2010. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/

Melamed, Fred. “Comedian Movie Trailer.” 6, October. 2006. Online video clip. youtube.com. 25, February. 2010.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVDzuT0fXro

Neo8trix9. “20th Century Fox logo 2009 720p HD.” 27, October. 2009. Online video clip. youtube.com. 25, February. 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-jcVg32zPI

*Note* For the “Comedian movie Trailer” we used these parts of it:

0:31-0:37 in a world (6 sec)

0:42-0:51 oh ok (9 sec)

0:54-1:05 one man (11 sec)

1:07-1:08 more than ever (1 sec)

total: 27 seconds

And for the 20Th Century Fox logo 2009 720p HD: total: 23 seconds.

For these two video clips we turned them into audio files and used them for our project.

My mom sent me this link to just educate me more on Tourettes syndrome, yet at the same time it corresponded with our audio project. How NY Times presented the information was a picture of the person and a text beside it giving a little summary and then the person would tell their anecdote of having tourettes and we would hear their story in a 1 to 2 minute clip. I thought the format was very easy to understand and accessable.

To check out NY Times Tourettes audio program click on the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/11/health/healthguide/TE_tourettes.html?ref=views

In Nakamura’s  article she argues that the early era of media studies focused on stereotyping and that the internet produces cybertyping. The assumptions with diversity on the internet is a problem of access, not content. Even if many people can access the internet there is still a monoculture because only a few individuals produce the internet content. Another assumption we pointed out in class was that being online destroys the bias people hold. This isn’t true becasue people still might hold prejudices by products of their culture.

I thought one of the must interesting points we made as a class was that in real life people are forced to reevaluate how people think, yet online communities don’t challenge stereotypes or expose users to new ways of living. Nakamura’s conclusion corresponds in that she says that the post-body mind ends up reenforcing conventional sterotypes about race and gender.

Doug Engelbart was a researcher at the Augmentation Research center at Stanford Research Institute. What did he do? Well in 1968 he presented a 90-minute public demonstration of the online system he and 17 other researchers had been working on since 1962. The presentation was at the fall Computer Conference in San Francisco convention center and around 1,000 computer proffesionals attended.

In his 90-minute presentation, the first ever mouse was shown. In addition many other inventions were demonstrated such as hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration  involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

Although Ted Nelson is considered the grandfather of hypertext, Doug Engelbart’s NLS system was the first of hypermedia which had a greater influnce on the development of hypermedia.

So I thought Engelbart was interesting becasue his institute was in my neighborhood and he and his team invented things I use today in my daily computer life.

If you want to watch the first 10 minutes of Engelbarts presentation click on the youtube link!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4kp9Ciy1nE[/youtube]

Landow talked about hypertext and hypermedia and how literary and technological formats are similar in many ways. The idea of a piece of paper and how it still is prevalent in online webpages today. Also he emphasized the relationship between the author and the reader and how they can work off each other and how the reader can create new links within the authors work. I think the paper/book format will never totally be vanished from our layout of computers.