New Media Studies Autoblog, Summer 07

Here is our entire presentation, successfully recorded live on Ustream. My part of the presentation lasts about 15 minutes, and I come on at about 119:15. No buffering required!

Original post by humanisticmystic

When I first started working on this movie, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. A film about Web 2.0? How could I resist? Once I came up with an idea, I worked furiously on the screenplay. By the end of the process, I was even scriptwriting in my dreams. I finally started filming with exactly two weeks left to the due date. Didn’t really bother with sleep anymore, and my friends began to complain that I was never around. This has probably been one of the most exhausting experiences of my life, right behind hiking in the French Alps at age seven and junior year of high school. But you know what? I made a movie
I promise that, going into this, my intentions were the very best. I was going to make a movie about Web 2.0 in an interesting, creative way. I wanted to explore […]

Original post by arynna

I just wanted to say that I think everyone did an awesome job on their presentations last night! 
 
Here is my project (the word document) :
 
Facebook

What is Facebook?
Facebook is a social networking website
It is described as a type of virtual yearbook
-The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff.
Creation
Created by Harvard students Mark Zuckerburg and Chris Hughes
…Timeline…
2004
Feb. 4 ~ Facebook was launched
– at first only available to Harvard students
-within 2 weeks half the student body joined; within one month, 2/3 of the
students were members.
April ~ expanded to other Boston area schools and all Ivy-League schools
Many individual universities were added in rapid succession by the end of the year
December ~ over 1 million users
2005

September ~ opened to high school students

October ~ expanded to most colleges in the US, […]

Original post by Ashley

Introduction
The Internet is an opportunity for people to interact however they desire. Some desire to share pictures and videos. Some desire to invent lolmemes. I desire to engage in intelligent conversation. In an ideal world, I could join the “Brain Chain” discussion board and come to Copernican revelations with other thinkers of the highest caliber from around the world. Unfortunately the world is not ideal.
As we had discussed earlier in the session, bringing bright minds together with the hopes that they will come to profound realizations doesn’t really work. You would think that a campus of champions would come together to breed a generation of wisdom. Instead they collectively gripe about the greasiness of their food. Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer articulate this problem pretty clearly. “In the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.” You […]

Original post by humanisticmystic

”’We the Journalists”’
For the longest time, a degree and a job at a private organization have determined whether or not you are fit to tell others of the events of the world around us. Anderson Cooper certainly is qualified. He’s done amazing stories under CNN, made all the more great once a flashy logo and banner were added. Here’s the thing though, all those news outlets (CNN, New York Times, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, to name a few) are private businesses. This essentially means that they control what gets released. The Fox news network is probably the worst offender of this. Anyone who watches Fox news can clearly see a biased spin to their stories, to the point that the network is constantly ridiculed by its peers and sites such as foxattacks.com (whose tagline is “they distort, we reply”)[http://foxattacks.com/] are spawned to counteract the bias that is portrayed in the news. […]

Original post by georgestreet

If you have not added my facebook page to your friends, do it!
Don’t forget to add yourself to the group as well!
I am putting my notes and powerpoint presentation up on my projects page on the syllabus.  (I tried to put the notes on here but it was too messy bc I wasn’t uploading it right, haha).
ps~I’m sad that tonight is our last class – I’ve really enjoyed it!

Original post by Ashley

(Pre.Script. I never explain to you what Value P is,
 get curious and do some exploring once in awhile why don’t you) 
Walker Percy’s short essay entitled ‘The Loss Of The Creature’ was a remarkable yet difficult text for me to get through.  While I was enthralled by the points I was able to understand, I was at the same time baffled by things he talked about which didn’t register with me.
What was most intriguing to me was Percy’s notion of how a person’s individual perception about something buried or even lost due to the expectation and organization of preexisting methods of though.  Percy talks about an individual viewing a place for the first time with fresh eyes and dubbing it to be beautiful.  Perhaps the person then goes home and tells everyone how beautiful the place is, or takes photos of it to showcase it’s beauty.  Soon, many people are traveling […]

Original post by Peanut!

Music is an art form that just about every human being enjoys.  The thing about music is, there are so many different genres, that there is bound to be something out there that you find enjoyable to listen to.  The only thing is it can be rather difficult to find new music that suits your taste if you are not into the music that is played on the radio.  Prior to the Internet, people had to rely on others with similar tastes in music to introduce them to different bands.  The Internet has revolutionized the distribution of music, but it has also made it easier for the general public to obtain illegal copies of songs.
The music scene was revolutionized by recommender systems for music.  Sites like Last.fm, and Pandora explore the listener’s taste and makes recommendations based on music that they already enjoy.  These systems not only help music fans […]

Original post by Amanda

I have become very interested in a point that is mentioned in an article by Sherry Turkle entitled: “Video Games and Computer Holding Power”. In her piece, Turkle discusses the experience you feel when you are playing a video game and are so into it that you can’t tear yourself away from it and you always want more.  In a side note, Turkle also discussed psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s (Mee-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee) philosophy about a sensation he has dubbed to be FLOW.
This is what I understand flow to comprise of(from the combined perspectives of Turkle and Csíkszentmihályi, as well as what was brought up in class discussion): a unified zen state of action and awareness where what you are doing, thinking, and feeling all come together and you lose track of time because you have become so merged with the activity and inside the thing you are doing that the world just […]

Original post by Peanut!

So, we watched the Democratic debate hosted by CNN and Youtube streamed LIVE over the internet. Candidates were asked questions from Americans via video uploaded onto Youtube. Entrants were allowed to create a video under 30 seconds in length which could pose a question to a specific candidate or the whole group. An added kick was that the entrants could personalize the video in true Youtube culture fashion: the result of which were the standard webcam video of the questioner or even a more creative approach of song or animation. One such question was and animation of a snowman that was used to kick off the debate on global warming…which I thought was actually counterproductive in that it took what should have been a serious subject and made it seem more trivial (didn’t Kucinich yell something about making sure our snowmen had a future?). I stray though…this debate allowed for […]

Original post by georgestreet