January 5, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6
The article speaks about Narrative. All art is a story which humanity tells itself, and narrative is the underlying structure of that endeavor. Changing the filters is creativity. Re-telling the same old stories but in new ways continues the dialog that builds and evolves culture.
When Louis Henry Gates, Jr. (American literary critic, born 1950) said that “people arrive at an understanding of themselves in the world through narratives” he was saying that narrative is the foundation for the creation of culture, and the backbone of the civilizing process. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, trans-historical, trans-cultural; it is simply there, like life itself.”
E. M. Forster (British novelist, 1879-1970) defines story as “a narrative of events, arranged in their time sequence.” Time itself is the story, a sequence into which we put the narrative of our passing through space. Paul Ricoeur (French philosopher, 1913-2005) states that narrative is inseparable from temporality. Despite the fact that time moves forward, we seem to need closure in narrative. In one sense, there is no definitive closure to the stories that society tells itself with narrative, as we are constantly dreaming it forward. The new interactivity of the Realm of the Circuit adds further dimension to the issue of closure, the narrative and the story.
Question 1: Do you believe that narrating is the foundation for the creation of culture?
January 5, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged NYT Saving the Story
The article by Michael Cieply tells us about the movie world worrying about the fall of stardom for years.
Now there are growing fears that another chunk of film architecture is looking wobbly: the story.
Once president of the Paramount Pictures motion picture group, Mr. Kirkpatrick last year joined some former colleagues in starting Plymouth Rock Studios, a planned Massachusetts film production center that will provide a home for M.I.T.’s storytelling lab while supporting it with $25 million over seven years.
Mr. Guber, who teaches a course at the University of California, Los Angeles, called “Navigating in a Narrative World,” is singularly devoted to story. “Storytelling is flourishing in the world at a level I can’t even begin to understand,” said Ken Brecher, the institute’s executive director. Mr. Brecher spoke last week, as his colleagues continued sorting through 9,000 films — again, a record — that have been submitted for the coming Sundance Film Festival.
The festival, set for Jan. 15 to Jan. 25 in Park City, Utah, will have story as its theme. The idea, Mr. Brecher said, is to identify film stories that have defined the festival during its 25-year run, and figure out what made them tick. If anything, Mr. Brecher added, technology has simply brought mass storytelling, on film or otherwise, to people who once thought Hollywood had cornered the business.
A possible outcome, they speculate, is that future stories might not stop in Hollywood all. Mr. Kirkpatrick is not completely at ease with that prospect, partly because his Plymouth Rock Studios, a $480 million enterprise, will need scores of old-fashioned, story-based Hollywood productions to fill the 14 soundstages it plans to build.
January 5, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged Lost
Why Lost is genuinely new media
The article is about the series Lost which I have never watched but heard it is a good show. Lost creators have created a whole new world for tv by enabling interaction around the show. Lost is a far more ambitious piece of media, which uses the entire web as its canvas and its entire audience as its creators. There are numerous message boards about Lostpedia which makes you wonder if the writers read the blogs. The Lost series has raised the bar for mainstream media. The fan sites creat a public display of passion for the show, which nervous Hollywood execs sometimes use to justify renewing a show that might otherwise be cancelled due to mediocre ratings.
Question 1. Have you watched the show Lost and commented on the message boards?
Question 2. Do you believe that the Lost researchers are reading all the content on the blogs and that the show is only being produced a few episodes in advance because the screenwriters are reading all the comments on the message boards?
January 5, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged interactive tv
The paper tells us about Interactive TV which has been around for as long as television. Interactive TV is when the viewer and broadcaster can communicate with each other, usually in real time. Normal TV flows in a one way path, from the broadcaster to the viewer, however interactive TV, usually includes a digital modem or other form of hardware that can return information or data from the viewer back to the broadcaster which can include either the cable operator, satellite TV operator or broadcast company.
Interactive TV sometimes referred to as iTV has been growing in popularity and today with new innovations in technology is already in many peoples homes. Another common feature that is making its way into the interactive TV market is the ability to purchase products and services via your TV set. Today, you can easily purchase a pay per view program with the click of the remote, but very soon, you might be able to watch a TV commercial and instantly purchase and pay for the product being advertised with just one click. Other possible features could be the ability to have pizza delivered or order other services.
Many cable or satellite services already include many services and products that you can buy with just one click of your remote, expect more to follow as the technology and demand improves. Another type of interactive TV technology that is available today is the ability to vote or cast you’re your opinion via the TV set. Many television programming asks viewers to participate live with their show. This might be in the form of voting for a favorite entertainer, voting in a news poll or giving your opinion on a new show.
Interactive programming benefits both the viewers and businesses involved. For viewers, there are more choices in programming than ever before and you can do much more with how you view your TV. For businesses, interactive TV helps them market products and services that a specific viewer or household is interested in. Interactive TV is here to stay and you should see much more uses for it in the near future.
Question 1: Have you ever participated in voting for your favourite entertainer or cast your vote on the tv set?
Question 2: Can you see purchasing an item from your tv with the touch of your remote in the future?
January 5, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged you tube
The presentation starts off with Lawrence Lessig speaking about in 1906 John Philip Souza was not a fan of the talking machine stating that they were going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When he was younger you use to find young people singing on their porches and today all you hear is these infernal machines going all day and night. He then speaks about culture being a Read Write culture but Souza was afraid we lose that capacity and change into a read only culture. Culture where creativity was consumed but the consumer was not a creator. He then goes on to talk about Lord Blackstone and the Tresspassing Law that the land is protected all the way down below and to an indefinite extent upward. But then when the aeroplane came along where they violating the tresspassing law. It went to the supreme court and common sense prevailed. He speaks about the terror of broadcasting which was a new way to spread content. At that time the entity that controlled the performance rights for most of the music was ABSCO they tried to demonstrate to broadcasters who really was the boss by raising rates from 1931 to 1939 by 448% until the broadcasters finally said enough and Broadcasters Music Incorporated (BMI) opened up in 1939 and in 1940 ABSCO threathened to raise their rates because they taught the people would revolt because they wanted the number one station but the people didn’t and in 1941 they crashed. Nowadays kids are remixing songs to make something different. The law has not greeted the Souza revival with common sense instead they are saying these activities are illegal. There is a growing extremism in response to the conflict between the law and the use of technologies. Kids are rejecting copyrighting and that the law should be ignored.
Question 1: Do you think that copyright laws should be changed?
January 4, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged copyright
I found this article by David Pogue very interesting it talks about PyMusique being written for one reason only to strip the copy protection off of songs from the iTunes music store. The programs existence had triggered an online controversy about the pros, cons and implications of copy protection. He shows some examples of ripping CD’s to your computer or another CD and asked the audience how many people have done that even though it is technically illegal. He gives many other examples like having your friend make you a copy of a DVD of a show you didn’t get to see. Nowadays the majority of youth don’t think there is anything wrong with making copies. Can you imagine what it will be like in 20-30 years.
Question 1: Do you think it should be illegal to record your favourite shows or copy music?
Question 2: If it is illegal why is it so easy to make copies?
January 4, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged plagarism
The article by Jonathan Lethem talks all about plagiarism in books, music, movies and so on. I found the article very long but it taught me a little about plagiarism. Plagiarism has been going on for a long time but you can change a few words in the topic and you can argue that it is not plagiarized.
Question 1: Do you think you will be able to stop plagiarism especially with CD’s?
Question 2: Are plagiarism laws too strict?
January 4, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6
First Photo
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Merged Photo
January 4, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged 00.html, 1702111, http://www.time.com/time/printout/0
The article tells us about a young Japanese woman called Okiyama’s and her first keitai shosetsu or “cell-phone novel,” K, was written on her 3G Sharp handset and finished with a speed that would have left Barbara Cartland eating her literary dust. In book form, it is 235 pages long. “I had never written a story,” she admits. As early as 2000, keitai shosetsu were appearing on the website Maho i-Rando, which offered MySpace-style homepages, to which readers posted diary entries via their cell phones. “We gave them a tool that allowed them to publish novels, short stories and poems, chapter by chapter, just like a real book.” That represents a lot of phone time. “Cell phones occupy pockets of spare time in people’s daily lives — especially for exchanging nonurgent e-mails, playing games, visiting fortune-telling sites. Keitai shosetsu fit in that tradition.”
In major book wholesaler Tohan’s 2007 best-seller list, five out of the top 10 books in the fiction category are keitai shosetsu, including the top three. The new genre is provoking fierce indignation among Japan’s literati, many of whom think that keitai shosetsu should stay on cell-phone screens. A popular cell-phone novelist sells several hundred thousand, and recruitment for new talent is intense. “Keitai shosetsu are usually about love stories — often romantic relationships experienced by the target audience,” says Mari Kuramachi, an editor at Starts. “Why don’t you write a novel and move me?” read one angry schoolgirl’s recent online post, in response to a vehement keitai shosetsu detractor.
Question 1: Do you access the internet from your cell phone more often than your PC?
January 4, 2009
· Filed under 1/6/09 Reading 6 · Tagged Facebook
Facebook’s Beacon just the tip of the privacy iceberg
Similar (or worse) tracking and information collection rampant across industry
December 3, 2007 (Computerworld) Facebook’s Beacon ad service may, ironically, be the best thing that’s happened to the online privacy movement in a while.
The controversy raised by the social networking site’s use of the Beacon technology has helped drag into the open the widespread but hitherto largely hidden problem of online consumer-tracking and information-sharing, according to privacy advocates.
Facebook’s Beacon was released in early November as a part of its Facebook Ads platform. It is ostensibly designed to track the activities of Facebook users on more than 44 participating Web sites, and to report those activities back to the users’ Facebook friends, unless specifically told not to do so.
The idea is to give participating online companies a way to monitor the activities of Facebook users on their Web sites and to use that information to then deliver targeted messages to the friends of those Facebook users.
According to the researcher, Facebook’s Beacon tracked the activities of users even if they had logged off from Facebook and had declined the option of having their activities on other sites broadcast back to their friends.
Likely to be even more damaging was another disclosure Monday afternoon that Beacon’s tracking did not stop with just those of Facebook users. Rather, it tracks activities from all users in its third-party partner sites, including IP address data of people who never signed up with Facebook or those who deactivate their accounts.
Others simply revise privacy policies quietly when they get into new marketing agreements.
According to Montgomery, social networks are compiling elaborate profiles of their users by gathering “every bit” of data possible from the information people include in their profiles or post on the sites, and by tracking what their users do online.
A group created on Facebook to support a petition started by the MoveOn political advocacy group to protest Beacon’s lack of privacy protection added 50,000 members between Nov. 11 and Nov. 29. Facebook users in the discussion forum for that group noted that their real complaint about Beacon is that Facebook is collecting the data about their purchases.
Question 1: Do you object to your information being harvested and shared without your consent on Facebook?
