MIT Basketball vs. Salve Regina Post-Game Wrap-Up

Highlights and player interviews from MIT vs. Salve Regina basketball game on 11/4/06.

MIT Basketball @ UMass Boston Post-Game Wrap-Up

Highlights and player interviews from MIT @ UMass Boston basketball game on 11/11/06.

Becoming too Digital

Having finished most of my school work for the week, I thought it would be fun to finish watching eXistenZ, a film we started in class a couple of weeks ago.

To sum up, and without giving away too much of the plot, the movie is about a multiplayer game that brings its players into a virtual world where the game and reality become fused and often indistinguishable. The game-pod uploads information by directly porting into bodies of the human players. Once the game begins, the player immediately falls into a deep sleep and begins to experience eXistenZ as a video game persona inside the game.

While a player’s game character may have the same facial features, and can recall various things from his or her actual life, the game character may wear entirely different clothing, have a different accent, or even have certain uncontrollable urges and impulses. The game plot often drives a character to do things that the actual player would not do in real life in order to advance the game. The objective of the game is to ask the right questions and make the right moves in order to survive. However, the game is constantly changing as its players are transferred from one scene to another. As the players navigate through the layers of the game, they begin to lose the ability to perceive reality, and they ultimately lose control of themselves.

While virtual games like eXistenZ do not exist today, the concept of losing oneself in a digital world is very much real to our world. Billions of people go online everyday - hiding behind game characters and screen names, a user can become an entirely different person and live a completely different life. In the movie, a gas station owner who owns very little worldly possessions claims that his life was transformed by virtual gaming. While his work day is tedious and he is relatively unimportant in society, he spends his nights in a virtual world where he is respected and his talents are needed.

While digital features like online chat rooms and games are extremely enticing and even addicting, I believe that they should only serve as a means to entertain and tools for communication. If a user completely immerses him or herself into a virtual world, the person risks losing his or her identity - and the ability to function normally in society.

so i just realized!

So I was showing my friend the websites tonight, I realized that I need to tell you how to use/navigate the sites!
My project was an exploration on the interfacing of FAMILIES OF PICTURES (comparing and contrasting) for webpages, not on just any interfacing. Therefore, it was intended that one would look mostly at the pages with the families of pictures. Other pages were put in to give context and some sense of realism. But this also means that I did not create entire websites (I did not create an entire Facebook-like or Google-like website), but rather, I segregated out the Photos part of the websites, and simply showed buttons that referenced other parts of the websites.

I will clarify all of this also when I present.
Thanks!
I hope the following helps some!

Also, note! I will be putting a Word Doc. of the guidelines under:

http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media

THANKS!!
Tiffany



GUIDELINES FOR USING THE WEBSITES

SEARCH-ENGINE WEBSITE:
• Roll-over the mouse over the pictures.
• Select any of the pictures by clicking on the picture.
• You may Either choose to click on the source URL or image URL

SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITE:
• Click on any of the pictures on the album home page.
• This brings you to a page with 3 images.
• Click on the small images to look at other pictures.
• You may click on “tiffali” in the bar near the top to see a profile page. (This page just gives the website context, although it is not a page with a family of pictures.)
• If you clicked on “tiffali” you can click on the “The Dominican Republic!” picture in the “Albums” bar near the bottom of the page to return to the album home page.

PRODUCT-SELLING WEBSITE:
• The first page you see just gives you context so you know what the site is about.
• Click on “Products” to see the page with a family of images.
• Click on one of the first three pen images to see a detail page of one of the products. The other images do not lead to pages, because the first three already demonstrate the idea.
• To return to the page with the family of images, click on “products” again.
• To see other detail pages, click on one of the images under “you might also want”
• To return to the homepage, click “home.”

PORTFOLIO WEBSITE:
• The first page gives you context so that you know that you are entering one project out of a designer’s collection of projects.
• Click on the first image for “a scholar’s residence.”
• Click on any of the images on the left to see a larger image of it on the right.

Barnett Koryan & Alan Ho Final Project Write-up

Overview

Our media project was to create a series of post game videos which would allow for more people to get to know the MIT varsity basketball team. We interviewed members of the team after games to get their thoughts on the game. We also asked a different question each video that gave more insight about the players outside of basketball.


Video Production

We interviewed the players with a Sony digital camera. The camera was easy to use. It recorded the video onto a hard that was part of the camera. This made it easy to transfer the video to a computer and keep video quality. We used game film which taped for coaches and players to break down and learn. In order to use the game tape which was in VHS format had to be transferred to DVD. Alan ripped the DVD so we could edit it. In the editing process we used the software, Windows Moviemaker. Windows Moviemaker is similar to Apple’s iMovie. It allows for video with music or sound over it. We can also create video out of still shots.

For our video series, we decided that a standard format for the video was good. It connected our videos together. The beginning and end of all the videos were same. We also created a frame that we could put still pictures and allow space for additional information to be given.


Findings / Problems

Working on this project we ran into a few conflicts. As members of the basketball program, we found it hard to conduct the interview right after games. MIT basketball is a division 3 program that is not use to “media” and interviews. The season has started not as we expected. We have not been playing well to our coach’s standard which becomes our standard though our record says we’re a winning team. After our games since we have not played great in any of them, no one on the team really wanted to be interviewed. And we did not want to interview them in that state. Our videos are meant to portray the basketball team in the best way. Anger and devastation were not images that we wanted to record for all to see.

We also had conflicts with retrieving the game tapes. We had to work around our coaches’ schedule. The coaches had to turn the VHS tape into DVD and this took time. We also found it hard to want to retrieve the tapes because it is hard to watch and cut out clips of a bad game. Many amateur athletes just want forget or at least not have a bad performance be pointed out to them.

The volume of games has been difficult to deal with, especially with delays in getting a usable format of our game film. We have had five games in twelve days with a Thanksgiving holiday where parents were around.


Achievements

We were able to create post game videos for our game scrimmages. They have been seen by many people that have connections to the basketball team. In order to help us expand our audience, and reach out to all our fans, we are currently in the process of embedding our videos on mitathletics.com, our school’s official NCAA website. Additionally, students from the nearby Cambridge school have seen it and gave some feedback. They really liked the videos that we made. The students from the school have talked about the video with the players that visit the school to help tutor. They are looking forward to our first home game that is on December 2nd. So we have accomplished our secret goal of getting more and a wider variety of fans.

Final

HELLO!
All of my work is this folder online:
(Included in that folder is the 4 website I made and the final paper I wrote in PDf and Word Document.)

http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/







Here are the links individually: (Note: the HTML sites require that you have Flash Player on your computer, which you can download for free online :D)

websites:
http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/1.html
http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/2.html
http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/3.html
http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/4.html

paper:
http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/final.pdf
http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/final.doc
http://web.mit.edu/tli/Public/media/process.pdf



COOL!
Tiffany

Viral Media, the Hive Mind, and Remix Culture

Link to full paper:
HTML
OpenOffice 2.0
PDF

Video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjNa7nHFju4

Jim Joe and John

It's just a game right? No, it's a lifestyle.

Hundreds of thousands of people every year go out to their local Best Buys and Wal-Marts to buy the exact same gaming CD enclosed in the same mass produced packaging. They all put the CD into their computers and click "run", but perhaps this is when their experiences fork from the identical to the individual. Today's flight simulation games are ambiguous as to their target audience. Does one play them to see how much blood can be drawn or how many tanks can be blown up during a mission? Or, does one play to experience and respect the sacrifices and dedication of the military that defends that which is worth defending? When all else fails, is it for the experience playing at a level of detail that blurs the lines between gaming and reality? Only you can make that decision, because to each and every one of you there exists an inherently fundamental line between the real and the surreal. Some games disregard the line; others strive desperately to walk it or push it further. In particular, flight simulation games have emerged in recent years as the genre that makes realism fun. It merely depends on who "you" are and where your idea of “fun” lies in the spectrum of simulation gaming.
Taking into account the breadth of experiences and expectations towards flight simulation, we devised an experiment to see how people's passion and/or relation to a game's subject matter translate into their gaming experience. Air Combat simulation games in particular attract a certain die-hard fan base for seemingly unknown reasons. This genre of game seems to scare away the types of gamers who derive their fun from outlandishly hectic and intense gaming experiences such as trying to blow up futuristic laser tanks with a ridiculous gadget in the midst of an intergalactic space battle. Flying a flight simulation game can't possibly get your blood pumping like that all the time because of the inherent nature of flying. Over half of the typical flight mission is spent flying straight and level. The excitement starts, depending on one’s perception, as a little green dot appears on the radar screen to indicate an ingress enemy fighter. After a minute or two of flying in a straight line, one would see a little black dot appear out of a cloud and shoot a missile at it. Once the target is defeated, all that is left is to proceed to fly straight and level to the next objective.
The main question we aim to explore deals with what type of person it takes to break a sweat over that little green dot on the radar screen. Who finds this sort of ultra-realistic game riveting and why? To find the answers to these questions three people will be asked to play "Lock On", an air combat simulation game in a controlled environment; a random person who has no prior passion for flying or flight simulation games, a civilian who does harbor a passion for the aerospace world, and finally a cadet in MIT's Air Force ROTC detachment 365 who aspires to fly military aircraft as a career after school. Judging by their answers to some key questions as well as their reactions to the game and noting the level of realism that they select to play it at, we will be able to draw some conclusions that hopefully answer our fundamental questions about the ties between a game and its players.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the idea of simulation in media has been explored. “It is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these.” Jean Baudrillard presents a despondent yet poignant view of simulation. He argues that simulation, though it strives to attain the highest level of realness, can never fully represent the real because it is based on a fixed model of behavior, as a result, can only have a limited number of outcomes, no matter its complexity. Unfortunately, our levels of simulation have advanced to a degree that we can foresee many possible outcomes previously unattainable. Letting our society use these simulations to model their real life counterparts essentially annihilates reality as we know it by leaving no room for the unintended or the imaginary . He describes it as being “No longer anything but operational, in fact, it is no longer the real, because no imaginary envelopes it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.”
In many ways, Baudrillard is correct in his description of the role that simulation plays in society. In many cases, our reactions have been reduced to a series of simulations with known outcomes. For example, the simulation of a terrorist attack has been outlined in every way, shape, and form. Through law enforcement, entertainment and government, a system of reactions to terrorist threats has been set up based on every known and anticipated instance of attack. This shouldn’t be a problem as long as every attack falls within our spectrum of knowledge. However, this method of reaction eliminates our ability to react to instances outside the realm of models and simulation. This is when our system could break down and potentially put people in danger. The same applies to flight simulation. Playing a flight simulator to the point of mastery won’t teach a person the feel of the flight stick under a high-speed bank or the glare of the sun off the wing. A pilot having trained only on simulation could potentially be crippled in reactions to unforeseen events, according to Baudrillard. However, Simulacra & Simulation was published in 1981. There was no way for Baudrillard to envision the magnitude in which computers have since grown in power.
Today, some simulations still use systems of models to output reactions, but these systems are so vast and complex, that empirically they have captured almost every known outcome or ramification. Flight simulation itself has been constantly improved over its nearly 100 year lifespan. In present day simulations, the entire nose of the aircraft is rebuilt and every possible simulation taken from countless acts of empirical tests is accounted for. After a certain point, this information reaches critical mass, concurrent with Yochai Benkler’s description of peer production. It seems that at this point, with this level of technology, U.S. governments can be satisfied with their investment in training their pilots first on a simulator. That being said, how does all this information transfer to a video game, moreover, a videogame that will be fun to play?
Delving from Baudrillard, theorists on the other side of the spectrum maintain a feeling of necessity for simulation. Gonzalo Frasca talks of simulation as the ultimate learning tool, often misunderstood as an interactive narrative. With the dawning of the computer and artificial intelligence, simulations were created that could go right on a PC with no extra apparatus or setup. Frasca makes a clear distinction between simulation and narrative, “For an external observer, the outcome of a simulation is a narration. But the simulation itself is something bigger than narrative. It is a dynamic system that yes, contains thousands of potential "stories", but it is larger than the sum of its parts. The simulation itself is not a narrative, it is something different, in the same way that a kaleidoscope should not be understood as a collection of possible images but instead as a device that produces images according to certain mechanics.” One may ask why it does not suffice to show a film depicting a sequence of events . This may be true for teaching simple concepts, but for complex systems and ideas, experimentation is crucial to understanding. Applying this to our experiment, we aim to evaluate the tutorial section of the game, which merely shows how to maneuver the plane and use specific buttons. Is this helpful to the user or does one simply start playing in order to fully grasp the game?
For each subject the experiment was conducted in the same manner. Prior to their arrival, all equipment necessary for the experiment was set up and ready to operate. These preparations included all of the following: one laptop with "Lock On," our flight simulator of choice loaded onto it, one external hard-drive to store all data from the flight simulator, a flight specific joystick controller (pre-calibrated), one "Lock On" game manual, one laptop equipped with built in camera to film subject, a standard chair for the subject to sit in for the duration of the experiment, any number of extra light sources needed to illuminated the subject sufficiently for filming, and finally, one flat and otherwise cleared table used to mount all the equipment. Large and uncluttered rooms were chosen to hold the experiment in to reduce any or all distractions. No other electronic devices were allowed to be in use while the experiment was underway nor were any unassociated personnel allowed in the testing area. The atmosphere was kept as professional and sterile as possible to ensure that the game was the only focus for the subjects. Once ready, the subjects were asked to enter the room and take a seat in front of the computer and game controls. Before being filmed or allowed to play, the purpose of the experiment as aforementioned in the introduction was outlined and the subjects were given a chance to ask any questions. Once their questions and concerns were answered, the preliminary interview was initiated. While being filmed, the subjects were asked the questions based on their affiliation to the Air Force. The ROTC subject was asked a specific set of questions to determine his level of involvement with the organization:
• Do you aspire to be a pilot in the USAF?
• If yes, what type of aircraft would you prefer to pilot?
• How many years have you been a cadet?
• What experience do you have with real aircraft?
• Have you encountered a USAF flight simulator?
• How important is realism to you in this genre of video game?
• Is it more important than having an intense (but unrealistic) gaming experience?
• Do you ever play these games on your own free time?
• What will you be looking for in this particular video game?
• What other games do you play on your free time?

Questions asked to non-cadets:
• Are you sure that you don't harbor any secret desires to become a fighter pilot thus compromising the neutral manner of this study?
• What other video games do you play on outside of media studies surveys?
• Would you elect to play a flight simulator game on your own?
• What would you expect from the game?
• Is realism less or more important than the games ability to exhilarate you?
• Do you usually make connections with the real military services of the United States when playing military simulation games?

Filming was then stopped and the subjects were introduced to the game "Lock On". A training mission for an F-15C Eagle fighter jet was loaded onto the screen. Filming resumed as the subjects were asked to watch, but not play, the training mission. The training mission selected was a didactic and non-interactive experience that demonstrated the procedures and techniques for piloting the F-15 into simulated combat that would be later required in the experiment. During this time the gamer was left alone with the game, no further verbal explanation of "Lock On" or its workings were given. The only source of information regarding the game that the subjects were allowed to consult was the training mission. Filming ceased and it was explained to the subjects that they would now be playing an actual mission using the skills they had just developed in the training mission. They were allowed to adjust any settings of the game that affected the level of realism experienced such as quantity of weapons carried, skill of enemy pilot, weather, ease of radar use, level of systems automation, amount of fuel carried, and level of survivability for their own aircraft.
Filming resumed and the subjects were allowed to play the air combat mission with the settings they chose. Once the subjects lost (no one won) to the enemy or crashed the game was terminated. A series of follow-up questions were then asked to reflect upon the gaming experience, both the cadet and non-cadets were asked the same questions:
• You were allowed to adjust all of the settings; did you make it as realistic as possible?
• Did you read about the controls etc. before even beginning the game?
• When flying, did you follow all of your objectives precisely without detouring or messing around?
• Did you ever find yourself saying, "It’s not like that in real life."?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how close did this game bring you to feeling like a real fighter pilot?

Of the three test subjects, the one with no previous flight simulator experience reacted most negative towards the simulation experience. Based on videogames she did play, she enjoyed the gaming experience that provided instant gratification. As a result, it seemed she could not understand the subtle nuances of a flight simulator being too consumed with boredom of flying straight towards a target. It seemed she needed the narrative aspect of the game to keep her interested, or at the very least this type of free exploration didn’t excite her. Ironically, she thought the game was unrealistic because she ran out of ammo, when in reality combat fighters only have a finite number of missiles (6-8). Though she misunderstood the game, it seemed too realistic for her to really invest herself in the simulation.
Similarly, the ROTC cadet also had trouble engaging with the game, but in his case, it was for an entirely opposite reason. The test subject already had real flight hours along with some hi-tech flight simulation training, and that prior knowledge inhibited him from investing in the simulation. Interestingly, when asked about the training, he found it to be fairly adequate. He then noted that in the Air Force, up to $2 million dollars are spent training each pilot over a period of two years. Though he wasn’t entirely set on having the most realistic experience possible, the level of realism provided by the game couldn’t come close to his prior experience, and as such prohibited him from enjoying it. On the other hand, the subject that only played flight simulators thoroughly enjoyed his experience. He specifically noted that realism is what makes games fun for him. That being said, he had only previously played commercial flight simulators, not combat ones. This provided him with the perfect framework to engage in this game. His previous experience let him appreciate the flight physics and detail, yet his inexperience in combat simulation enabled him to immerse himself in the game without being held-up on inaccuracies. In addition, he was the only test subject that used the interactivity of the game to his advantage, experimenting with the jet’s capabilities in the beginning instead of flying in a straight line. His experimental nature can explain why he wasn’t involved during training because he couldn’t physically interact and learn the controls. All in all, his experience was most enjoyable, mainly because his definition of fun fell right on the line between gaming and realism.
Our experiment yielded quality data that we can use to re-evaluate our theories on flight simulation and simulation in general. It seemed that a clear distinction was made between the training, a narrative procedure, and the game, an interactive one. Concurrent with Frasca, though the game is more or less an amalgamation of narratives, it is, in itself, an entity on to its own. In addition, we found that the most enjoyable experience came from relating a well-explored framework (commercial simulation) to a new application (combat). This provided the user with ample tools to engage the game, yet posed a challenge at the same time, resulting in maximum enjoyment. To evaluate Baudrillard’s theory, it might be useful to follow the ROTC subject through flight school and into the field, interviewing him about how his training related to real flying. In any event, it seems that this massive following of flight simulator fans results from an appreciation of detail. That’s not to say each person knows everything there is to know about physics or airplanes, but one can understand the complexity and nuances that exist in flying. Maybe they feel it gets them closer to the gods; maybe it enables them to do things otherwise impossible. Maybe they just have their heads in the clouds.

Media’s Effects on the Behavior of Content Creators

Link to Research Paper: http://web.mit.edu/grk/Public/21W784/FinalProjectPaper.doc


Link to Media:
web.mit.edu/grk/Public/21W784/Final Video.wmv
web.mit.edu/grk/Public/21W784/Final Video.mpg


Guy-Richard Kayombya,
Nimish Ramanlal,
Vijay Umapathy

MIT Social Science

There is an overwhelming opinion that MIT students are entirely are geeks or nerds. Our own experiences at MIT so far would suggest that these views are not always accurate and that in actuality, MIT is an incredibly diverse place with a thriving social life. We thought that it would be interesting to make a short video interviewing a large pool of MIT students cataloguing their thoughts about life at MIT. We would then show the video to students in high school and students at other colleges and get their feedback about how the video changed their opinions about the social life at MIT.

See the whole essay here

Come to class on Thursday to see our video...

The Internet Video Revolution

Irish playwright Oscar Wilde once mused, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” In our society, it is a common dream to experience celebrity, to know what it is like to be recognized, talked about, and emulated. Historically, only a select few have attained celebrity status but thanks to the video sharing website YouTube, everyday people are becoming well-known and part of the common language of our culture. While it seems clear that the online video phenomenon is just beginning, it remains to be seen whether the site YouTube will last. As learned from many fleeting web successes, YouTube’s current status as the eighth most viewed website in the United States does not guarantee its continued success. The longevity of the hot spot will depend on Google’s application of its existing strengths to YouTube and its willingness to continuously revolutionize the site to ensure that it evolves along with copyright law and the culture.

And please go to this link to see my original creation for YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1xGR0wIfj8.

or

Automated Calculation of Word Correlations from Text

Automated Calculation of Word Correlations from Text
(direct link to Word Document download, 1.4 MB)

I present algorithms to mine data from large texts to estimate the degree of connection between two words by estimating their correlation, a measure of how often the words appear near each other, and how close they appear. The hit counts on Google searches allow a simple measure of correlation using the vast corpus of the Internet. I write a program to more accurately compute correlation of words within a text. Correlation data is used to locate conceptual clusters of words. I speculate on how one could extract semantic relationships from correlation patterns

Final Class Project - MIT Social Life

Hi Everyone!

Nick, Brandon, and I have posted our video online (still not the final version) and asked for feedback from high school and college students. We are hoping that people will talk about their thoughts about MIT and how their opinions changed after they watched our video. If any of you could take a minute and post a couple of thoughts about the video we showed in class, that would be great! Thank you so much and see you all in class Tuesday.

College Confidential
Facebook

Andrew, Brandon, and Nick

Information Display Link

Here's the link to where my first proposal for an image searching interface is.
It doesn't work yet and it has hardly anything on it, but I'll be working on it very soon to hopefully get it working within the next 30 hours.

NOTE: You must have Flash Player 9 downloaded on your computer to watch it.
(It's already on MIT Athena comps...but it might not be on everyone's PC's.)

http://web.mit.edu/tli/www/media/1.html

Peace!
Tiffany

Editted Project Proposal

On the Internet there are many websites that display families of pictures. A family of pictures is any set of pictures that were meant to be viewed and grouped together. An example of a \family of pictures is the search results that come up when you search for a word on Google Imagers. Another example of a family of pictures is set of pictures that show up when you click on “jeans” at Gap.com. All kinds of websites call for displaying families of images. Some other examples that display families of pictures are Flickr, Facebook Pictures, photography portfolios, and many more.

Websites have different purposes for displaying families of pictures. Because they each have different purposes in showing pictures, their interfaces are different from website to website. I will be researching how interfacing of picture-displaying websites reflect the intent of websites. There four categories of websites that display families of pictures. These categories are defined by the intent of the producers of the website.

The first type of picture-displaying website is websites that display families of pictures as information\. Users will ask the website for information about a keyword, and the website will return a set of images. An example of this is Google Images.


The second type of website is websites that display pictures for the sake of social networking. Examples of this are Flickr and Facebook Photos.




The third type of picture-displaying website is websites that are trying to market items to the public. Examples of this are Gap.com, BananaRepublic.com, and Buy.com



The last type of picture-displaying website is websites that are trying to market the originator of the website himself. This can be considered a portfolio website. For example, photographers will show their portfolios online to entice the public to hire him, not so that they will necessarily buy the pictures he shows.






I will be researching how the interfacing of each of the websites from different categories compare and contrast to each other. Things I will be examining include how the layout of the page is setup, how pictures are linked to each other and other pages, how much information is displayed, how graphic styles are used in the page, how graphic objects and pictures are placed and sized, how dimensions compare, how buttons are placed, how the name of the website compares to the information, and other elements.

After all the research is done, I will be making and designing my own websites under each of the categories based off of the research I have done.
I will make a website that returns search results when you type in certain words.
Then I will make a website that displays a family of pictures that looks like it was intended for a social network. I will also make a website that look like it is selling products. Finally, I will be making a website for my own portfolio.
When all is said and done, as a class we \can judge based off of my research how successful my own interface designs were.

Sorry for my tardiness...for better or for worse...

There has been lots of talk about the digital world around us. For better or for worse, our lives are being checkered with digital gizmos that either make things easier or make things more accessible than before. Looking at the progression of human life, it has gone from walking to running to riding on a horse to riding in a car to flying in a plane. It’s intuitively obvious that our lives are quickly approaching the speed of light. If I want to learn everything there is to know about the Great Wall of China, I don’t need to take a boat, I don’t need to fly in a plane, hell I don’t even need a supersonic jet. All I really need is a computer, a mouse, a keyboard, a monitor, but most importantly, a connection. It’s this idea of connection that drives Benkler’s call for commons-based peer production. Similarly, Jenkins’s talk of “convergence culture” deals with widespread access and connection to forms of media working towards the ultimate goal, synergy.

Sure, people have been throwing out lots of terms to describe where society is and most likely where it’s headed. But though this class looks at those issues, it is under the auspice of the idea that we are “becoming digital”. What does that mean, to become digital? Frankly, I think it’s hard to say because we as a society haven’t truly attained this idea. My idea of becoming digital is being able to turn on my computer, put on some headset, goggles and gloves, and walk the Champs-Elysees stopping to check out a store or talk to a fellow virtual tourist. I buy my French baret and then transfer myself to Florence, Italy right in the Boar’s Head Market. There I can shop some of the finest leather items in the world or go to a café to check the score of the World Cup game. Take World of Warcraft, mix it with some technology, and apply it to the real world. Instead of a druid or a gnome, we have ourselves, but think about being able to peruse exact virtual replicas of major cities all over the world! With all the advances in virtual reality, 3D rendering, even smell printers, this is entirely possible. This is what I think of when I hear the phase “becoming digital”. We as a society have clearly made advances, but there is no telling whether or not we will ever get to that totality of virtual existence.

I need to make the distinction that this was not my definition of “becoming digital”. It is merely a representation of how I envision an amalgamation of our technology and culture in synergy to let us explore for ourselves the wide world of the web sans just looking at images. My definition of “becoming digital” lies in the way we interface ourselves both with our belongings as well as with the world around us. It all started with “becoming analog” when instead of talking directly to a person we spoke into a receiver which turned acoustic signals into electrical impulses. They could then travel long distances and be converted back into sound. Plays have transformed into television and movies, radio broadcasts have turned into podcasts. Sooner or later the post office will die, can you believe that? Of course you can, who sends mail these days except magazine and catalogue providers? Yes, becoming digital is the way in which we interface with the world around us. Addiction, open source, commons, WOW, online gambling, etc… are all by-products of this interface. For better or for worse, this will continue until we will no longer ever need to leave the computer…for better or for worse…

E-lection Blog Party

As I'm starting this essay, the TV is on CNN displaying the latest election results. As I'm posting this, the Democrats have gained control of the House and the fate of the Senate is coming down to one race in Virginia. I'm working on a laptop in front of the TV with tabs open for Blogger, CNN, Google News, and my two favorite political blogs, TalkLeft and crooksandliars.com. As this is all going on, I'm wondering how much technology has changed politics and whether the changes have been for the better.

The CNN studio where all this is taking place has definitely been very digitized. There are the huge TV screens filling the studio following all the latest poll results that have been called in or sent over the internet instantly directly from the polling places. Everyone but the anchors are sitting in front of a computer. All of the graphics are obviously computer generated and very sleek. One of the reporters has a very cool looking large touch screen display that shows which seats belong to which party. One conclusion that can be made with absolute certainty is that graphics and animation on television look so much cooler now than they did before. This new, technology-filled CNN has the ability to get information to us so much faster and more clearly than ever before. CNN, along with all the other news channels and with online news sites, are able to instantly deliver information to the masses. It seems like, with so much greater access, more people would know about what's going on in politics and would be able to make a more educated decision in the voting booth.

Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. Anyone who wants to find this information has easy access to it, but less people are interested in it. Most people never take the time to do any research on the candidates they are voting for. And when these people do hear something about a candidate it's usually just because of some scandal or other shocking move that shows a candidate in one specific context instead of a view of how they usually act in office. Why would you when you have so many other toys to play with? If I'm not happy with how the world around me is working, I'll go find another world that I'm much happier with, like World of Warcraft. With all of this technology, it's extremely easy to tune out reality and live in a virtual world. Although, while this is a very important problem that we have to deal with, the technology itself is not at fault. Technology is an amazing thing and it should be up to the individual to decide how they want to use this technology.

In a room off to the side of the CNN studio, there was a party going on. They called this party the "E-lection Blog Party." Present were many well-known bloggers from blogs such as the aforementioned crooksandliars and TalkLeft. Blogging is another interesting phenomenon that has had an interesting effect on the political scene. Individuals have much more power in spreading information than they ever have had before and these blogs help in bringing more people and opinions to the table as well as more information that is not reported on larger news sources.

Everything around us is changing because of the new technology around us. The entire face of politics is changing and becoming much more influenced by 1s and 0s. As the people become more and more familiar with technology, politics becomes more and more digitized. And as politics becomes digitized, the entire world starts becoming digital.

Digital Compulsions

I find that I’m addicted to my computer.

It’s a necessity now- instant access to Firefox, Facebook, AIM, and Gmail grip me like no other force in my life. My world would temporarily suck into a toilet if someone so much as accidentally tripped over my power cord- power outages feel like black suffocation… but none of this bothers me. Because I know everyone reading this has access to and understands every application I just named. Everyone around me is just as addicted to the network media that’s swallowed us all- but I don’t have a problem with it.

Like every way of living, the digital economy has its ups and downs. Nobody complains about how quickly we can connect to each other, how incredibly quickened and instantaneously gratifying our lives have become, though everyone hates the always cold and impartial results of binary coding. Our experiences quantized are transmittable, shareable, and more available than ever before, if with all with grains of digitation in their many megabytes. But we ourselves are quantized creatures of quantized experiences- when every single sensation we go through is itself the result of interpreting the binary coding of nerves, why do we make a distinction between the binary within us and the binary in the computer screen?

So many people seem to cry against the “cold machine” that’s taking over, but I don’t think this is the biggest issue. Human interactions have always relied more on the intent and depth of conversations or letters, not the way they happen. Now and in the age before computers, close friends shared times together in the real world; relatives traveled to meet up with family; lovers crossed impossible distances to be with each other. But before we were all connected in this web, all these relations only interacted in the real time, when work and distances were not in the way. If anything, becoming digital has given people more of a chance to meet with the people they choose. E-mail gives us that much more chance to talk with people while we are working, while we are going through the motions we have to. No matter how cold or distant these interactions may seem, they are there as interactions when otherwise they wouldn’t be. And if people find that their relations with others are distanced because they communicate through the network media, that is entirely their own fault. If they can’t find the time out of their busy work life to meet with friends or family, what makes them think getting rid of their instant messenger and e-mail would let them?

No, the only problem I could have with the network information economy I find myself in is that I am dependent upon it. My life is tied psychologically to its instant connections, and my life at MIT would be very different without the Web (I’d have to go to every lecture then, wouldn’t I?). But then, that brings me back to my point that the World Wide Web, Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger, Gmail, and everything else that makes up that vast network out there, the one we can complain about, is indispensable. Think to yourself, “Would I get rid of the Internet?” “Would my relations suddenly improve because I find myself still rarely talking to them in the real world and not in the office, ever?”

Think to yourself, “Would I stop becoming digital?” If you’re reading this, I would say no. You wouldn’t stop Google's email from becoming better, or your favorite web browser improving its interface, or your life from becoming more and more digital. Because somewhere deep inside, you’re just as much a fan of becoming digital as I am.

Becoming Digital

If I chose to take “Becoming Digital” as my HASS-D this semester, it was for two specific reasons. The first is strongly related to the passion I have for international development. At first, the title of the course conjured up in me this confused idea of third world countries (especially in Africa) transiting from traditional media to modern digital media. I thought the class was going to talk about these developing countries and their new relationships with media. However, I rapidly came to realize that none of my expectations was going to be met. Unfortunately, for me, the class only focused on the western world and the distinctive digitalization process it was facing. However, I realized the possibility of using the concepts presented in the class and attempt to answer some of the questions that I was initially asking myself. What does “Becoming digital” mean for developing countries? What is there to gain or loose? These are the questions; I will try to answer in the rest of my essay.
“Becoming digital” is a process; as such, it involves a sequential progression from a starting state to a final state. The processes for both developed and developing countries share basic similarities. In both cases, the start and final states are quasi-similar. Media goes from a traditional form (oral, written) to a modern digitalized form (Internet). However, there exist fundamental differences. One fine example is the duration of the process: while the process started a couple of centuries ago in the developed world, it is more recent in the developing world and coincides with the beginning of colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, the process in developing countries skipped some important steps (i.e. )in order to reach its current state that is somehow comparable to the progress in the developed world(ubiquity of digitalized media). However, the progression in the third world countries was so fast that people, technology did not have the time to adapt to the new media settings. People have access to all the benefits of networked and digitalized media can provide, but they don’t take advantage of them because they do not know how to use them, or they don’t have the money to use them. For instance, in Kenya, I could connect to the internet and access all possible contents just like I do here in America but my use of internet was limited to Yahoo Mail because I didn’t know Wikipedia existed and streaming videos from YouTube all day long would be too expensive. People in developing countries today use their internet connection just like people in developed countries used internet ten years ago. Nowadays, the process of “Becoming digital” in both worlds has reached the same state when talking about technology but there is a decade shift when considering the human factor.
The hurried convergence towards a world where digitalized and networked media is ubiquitous presents some threats that are unique to the developing countries. In fact, one of the major dangers hanging over these countries is the lost of cultural identity. Even though the internet is a free space, where all the cultures can be expressed there is no guaranty for an equal representation. Taking into consideration that some cultures have an intrinsic ability to dominate over others, and that this ability heavily depends on the economical and political power of the culture in question there is no doubt that cultures from developing countries will be overly muffled. An explicit example would the millions of English articles in Wikipedia compared to the inexistent Rwandan articles. When a Rwandan student randomly browses wikipedia he doesn’t learn anything about Rwandan culture but instead absorbs random facts about English culture. That is the great threat that developing countries are now facing.

As a general trend, new media is essentially becoming digital. But what does this mean, and perhaps more importantly, why does it matter?

What we as humans are doing by moving toward new media is viewing what was once old media with higher resolution. Just as we examined the real world as a continuous structure with the naked eye but now realize that it can be broken into exceedingly small particles, we are breaking down photographs, video, text--all things we consider continuous--and re-examining them under a digital media microscope. In this sense, becoming digital is not really moving toward the new, but rather, looking at the old anew. We always had the ability to customize film and distribute it; anyone with the patience and the money could have taken an old movie film reel and pieced it into their own creation. The digital age has brought instead a new way of looking at the old; a way that makes it far easier to customize, to personalize, and to create.

On a physical and chemical level, photographs are digital, but on a level that we cannot easily manipulate. The swaths of shade and color, light and dark are really collections of atoms lined in arrays, reflecting very particular amounts of light at very particular wavelengths. Quite simply, our growth into the digital allows us to create a reality that competes with what is. The resolution is a bit choppy, and the computing power a bit limited, but we are slipping into ways of creating that rival the intricacies that define our reality. We have not created a new media, we have done more than that. We have created a new way of representing and creating reality, something we have always done through media in the first place.

In our last reading, we discovered Manovich's perspective on the "New Media" and how it can be differentiated from old media. Each of the issues he presents can also be applied to our becoming digital: Things are indeed becoming represented by numerical atoms, so to speak and are packaged into modules; this is the "physical" part of digital..but it isnt the only part. The most critical aspect of becoming digital is the affect it is having on us as humans. With this increased ability to create and share, there is a lot more creativity going around, the big companies are listening to the little people, there are completely new ways to interpret and convey the same old meaning. The "new media" that is emerging from becoming digital is bringing about a completely new societal construct. People are no longer limited by the amount of money they have, the time-zone they live in, or their technical abilities. The Digital age gives the average user the power to construct, define, and share reality, digitally.

Becoming digital may bring a lot of things to the table, but the most important thing it does for us is allow us to easily share our reality at a resolution unheard of in the past.

The Revolution WILL Be Televised

Some would argue that “becoming digital” is a bad trend in our society. Old, analog, media is being replaced by digital facsimiles that don’t convey the same amount of information. But really, becoming digital is not about the change in technology itself. It’s about the enablement of new forms of media and new forms of interaction that the technology has brought. Much of what we have today could have been accomplished with analog technology, but the digital world has brought endless possibilities directly to the consumers.

People interact and experience media in a new way in the digital age. There are no longer a select few media producers; everyone is a participant in the modern media culture. The success of YouTube has led to instant amateur stars. American Idol propelled an otherwise-unknown singer named William Hung to the public’s eye when he performed a laughable rendition of “She Bangs”. The viewers are also the content producers, replacing the centralized production system of the twentieth century. “Becoming digital” is about the new way in which every person is an equal participant and contributor to the media world.

Global knowledge is another artifact of the digital age. Where information previously took weeks, days, or hours to travel around the world, messages can now pass entirely around the world in less than 300 milliseconds. This leads to knowledge being spread around the world and being read by millions of people before anyone even has a chance to question its veracity. Jenkins’ discussion of the “Survivor Sucks” message board shows how new, potentially wrong, information circulates around a “knowledge community”.

One poignant example of global knowledge distorting the truth is the event that ended Howard Dean’s presidential chances. At a rally for supporters, a noise-canceling microphone caught Governor Dean screaming. Because the microphone didn’t pick up the sound of the crowd, those who watched the video saw Dean as crazy. Before anyone had a chance to correct the story, the video had traveled around the world and Dean lost his support.

Digital vs. analog is not about raw technology. It is about new ways to use technology, ways that have changed our mediascape forever. The most important thing that the digital age has brought us is citizen involvement – everyone is equal. This new form of popularity and fame is both a good and a bad thing. It has resulted in many surprises, both for the old media companies and for the new media creators of today.

Becoming Digital

The class name "Becoming Digital" for 21W.784 is going to have to change sometime soon. It won't be long before the people taking the class will have no idea what it means to not be digital. Perhaps it will have to be changed to "Becoming more digital". My father used to sit me down and tell me about the days when a computer took up a whole room. Years later computers got smaller, but they weren't exactly doing a whole lot more. If all our Macbooks and Dell PC's could do was type word documents and play one video game called Oregon Trail, I would argue that we hadn't yet earned the right to say that we've become digital. A digital society means so much more than just a wide distribution of cheap computers. It means the access to networked communities not bounded by geography and having the ability to share ideas and media at your fingertips. This has all happened, and has happened quite recently.
This sort of society-altering technology exists and has been warmly embraced by a few in America. Not everybody has a World of Warcraft community to go home to every night. However, most people do have an E-mail inbox to sort through or a facebook account to manage. Even my grandmother uses the internet on a daily basis. In this respect I feel that all of America (and most other developed nations) have become digital. It is just a matter of the extent to which individuals take it.
The idea of digital media being used for niche groups and special interests comes up time and time again in this class. The more I think about it, the more this seems true and pertinent to myself as a media user. The internet is my primary connection to the digital word. Without thinking about it I am constantly customizing my internet usage to fit my own lifestyle. Nobody tells you what websites to visit or what music and programs to download (legally of course). The internet has become so vast that there are no longer limitations to what you choose to learn from it. It's like an ultimate encyclopedia. If I want to know the resistance in the light-bulb filament on a Yamaha YZF-R1 motorcycle turn signal I know I can find it somewhere on the internet if I look hard enough. And here is the best part about the internet and becoming digital, even if that information about the turn signal isn't anywhere to be found on the internet, I can put it there. In fact, I find out about the lightbulb resistance later on I may even feel obligated to make available to others on the internet. This mentality is and has been key in the development of our digital world.
We didn't become digital when the computer was conceived or when the internet was introduced, we became digital when we realized the potential of these devices and decided to make them our own.

Becoming Digital

Until the last few decades, developments in media technology and computational technology remained separate, as computer developers created faster ways of processing and storing information and media creators moved from painting portraits to taking photographs and then capturing moving images. With the recent exponential growth in computational power and storage capacity, today’s definition of “data” has significantly evolved from its humble punch-card beginnings to encompass the majority of media to which society is exposed on a daily basis.

In the Digital Age in which we live, media is affected by computer technology in that static pieces of content are stored discretely in machine language (at its core, zeroes and ones), which ultimately means that media can be dynamically manipulated and distributed unlike ever before. Manovich refers to new media as “automated” and “modular”, both traits that correlate directly to the object-oriented structures of computer programs. In the database architecture upon which digital data storage is based, a set of information consists of encapsulating objects that contain dynamic data about their “state” and also perform functions or “subroutines” on other data objects. Similarly, digital media is stored as a data object (e.g. a sound or video file) that is “tagged” with information about the artists or companies involved in its production. However, unlike canvas paintings or even photographic copies of these paintings, new media is subject to computer algorithms, as all forms of media (audio, video, text, and photograph) are all reduced to binary code. These allow for a whole new variety of user content: content that stems off of existing work from existing artists. We find ourselves in an age where any general user can download programs that edit text, photographs, audio, and video, using computer algorithms to add sound effects, cut out voices, or even intermingle clips of multiple forms of media. A great example of new media is the rising art form of “machinima” films. These films are created by media users who manipulate console or computer game constructs to create films with plot lines, themes, and individual characters. One such film, “Red vs. Blue”, portrays the struggle of two characters from Halo who want to put down their guns and talk instead of entering the original ‘battle royale’ construct of the Halo game. This is only one example of the transient nature of new media, made possible simply by the numerical representation of media forms as data.

When operating under the general rule that anything that is reduced to computerized data can be manipulated, it is clear that becoming digital means entering a world of dynamic data that is altered either by the personal creativity of users or by computer algorithms, sometimes transitioning from one media form to another. The modularity and dynamic nature of computerized data are now properties of a new media, allowing for the development of peer-produced content and providing the user with not merely a painting and a canvas, but a paint brush, or graphics editing application, with which to modify and redistribute content to his or her heart’s desire into an infinite databank – the internet.

Becoming Digital

Six degrees of separation – purportedly, that is all that separates a farmer in mainland China from a business executive in New York City. In view of the emerging networked sphere, the six degrees of separation hypothesis warrants amendment; within the networked world, a three degrees of separation hypothesis might prove more adequate. Networking and digital advances have reduced the degrees of separation that separate people from people and people from ideas. However, becoming digital also comes with a price; humanity pays by sacrificing degrees of freedom, degrees of sensation, and degrees of thought. Never before have people been closer to other people, but yet further away. Never before has such an abundance of information been so readily available, yet new knowledge and innovation so far out of sight.

Perhaps the foremost problem with "becoming digital" is an intrinsic one that derives from the meaning of the phrase itself. Digitization connotes (if not simply by definition) the quantization of phenomena. That is, the wide, continuous range of human perception and sensation is discretized to a string of zeros and ones. For example, when people communicate via email and instant messenger over the internet, they often use emoticons. Emoticons, however, are a pity attempt to express human emotion. In effect, they discretize personality and sensory images into twenty to thirty cases. So why have email and instant messenger become so popular when the depth of interaction they provide is far inferior to that of the face-to-face conversation? The answer is ease of use and multitasking – having an instant message conversation does not preclude a busy student from working on a project at the same time. In a self-perpetuating cycle, "becoming digital" makes life faster paced and more busy; this, in turn, promotes the further use of "digital goodies" that supposedly save time.

The internet is a medium that is characterized by quickness: people gain rapid access to news stories, and peer communication is expedited. Gone are the days of written journals in which people would take the time to weave words into a finished masterpiece. Online journals such as Xanga contained daily accounts that were shoddy counterparts to their written predecessors. Things only got worse when the Xanga phenomenon was replaced by the MySpace phenomenon in which people expressed their individuality even less. Facebook, for example, reduces college students to a single, dichromatic, blue and white page; users are severely limited by the few degrees of freedom. While this limitation of freedom is imposed upon the user, the complete immersion into the digital world also causes people to voluntarily give up freedoms. When people know that machines, such as video surveillance cameras, are always watching them, they tend to limit or "self-censor" their expression.

In addition to fewer freedoms and sensations, accompanying the rise of the digital world is the decline in degrees of thought. Daydreaming and daily reflectance often beget innovation. However, in the digital sphere such entities are virtually nonexistent. Furthermore, the quantized nature of digitization promotes thinking within certain predefined schema. However, a prerequisite for ingenuity is breaking out of the routine schema that pervade society and hinder progress.

Some might argue that as we become more digitally advanced, we will receive the benefits of the digital world and be able to simulate the sensations and freedoms that accompany the real world. However, we must remember that no matter how high the resolution of a digital image, the pixels always become apparent when it is projected onto a sufficiently large screen.

A Leaf in My Shoe

As I sat around my room today thinking on what to how to write about our much beloved term “Becoming Digital,” I became curious to the fact of how many things in my room were not produced through digital means. The first thing that caught my eye was a notice about MIT housing that I had gotten in the mail. Nope, I couldn’t include the paper. It was not only a product of a document that had been fed through a digital printer, but the paper itself had probably been cut by a machine governed by a program and sensors that made only the most precise 8½” by 11” cuts. Next, I tried looking at my desk. Wood equals natural, right? Not in this case. The pieces were probably also cut in a manufacturing plant under similar conditions and coated in a sealant that I’m sure was not hand-mixed. After becoming a little discouraged at the possibility of not finding a way to escape the span of modern technology even in my own room, I glanced at the floor. A single gold, red, and brown leaf was caught in between the laces on my shoe from walking through a courtyard. This leaf I realized was the only thing in my small home that was truly natural. What could this mean? Have I truly lost touch with nature? Have I thrown down the gauntlet on being an organic being and seek to become immersed in a state of pure technology? It doesn’t mean this at all.

It has become commonplace for the belief that technology is slowly overtaking us, replacing our means of transportation, communication, education, and trade; in one sense, this is true. Technology does seem to be amplifying our standard of living by improving these qualities. However, am I less human because of it? Physically, no, I’m still me, an oxygen-breathing being that gets his energy from the food he eats instead of the socket in the wall. Psychologically, this is harder to prove, but the end result is still the same.

When becoming accustomed to new technology, people tend to regard it as an option to everyday problems as it intended for. For example, a person in the 1970’s needs to get a message to a co-worker on the other side of the state and needs a response in the next week. He has several options, including (a) drive across the state to deliver the message face-to-face while wasting time and money to operate a vehicle, (b) write a letter (1980’s = snail mail) and hope that the USPS is efficient enough to get a message and reply in time, or (c) call the co-worker on the telephone with little effort or cost and get a response within the length of the call. Obviously, option (c) will probably be chosen because it the most efficient solution to the problem. People today are no different. The advent of digital technology has for the most part improved the efficiency at which our problems can be solved so we tend to cling to them. E-mails are sent out in seconds; cell phones are mostly universal; and the combination of scanners, copiers, and printers renders almost every image or piece of text available for anyone. The question that remains is, “Are people dependent on digital technology?” No, not unless we force ourselves to be. Creating otherwise-impossible deadlines for projects that require digital tech is just part of the human progression of efficiency. If we can do it faster for little cost, why not do it?

Am I digital? No. I am an organic being. Until cellular make-up can be decomposed into binary code and implemented as such, this statement is true. Ideas I produce may be saved, stored, or altered on a computer. My actions may be acted out by the pressing of buttons that create electronic signals, but they are still based on natural thought. At the end of the day, I am more like that leaf than the machine on which I type.

The Beneficial Results of Becoming Digital

We live in a world revolving around a fully dynamic network of information known as the internet. The act of becoming digital, as our society currently is, seems to have been given a negative connotation in regards to its effects on our reality. For some reason there is this misconception that evolving technology, specifically the internet, is a tool that is depleting individuality and creativity amongst its users. Among other things, the thought of a truly digital age is directly associated with a disconnection from reality; but why? I argue the exact opposite. Individuality, creativity, and our sense of reality are all greatly enhanced by means of becoming digital, associated with the utilization of technological advancements.

The roots of individuality stem from knowledge and understanding, which is processed by the brain, resulting in the formation of opinions that create subjective thought. As the network of information from which we draw knowledge is increased, a greater sense of individuality will likely evolve. Therefore, by means of the internet and its monumental source of information, it is easier than ever before to form individual preferences, opinions, and so forth, in regards to any number of interests. The internet breathes individuality. In becoming digital, we have not given up our right to form opinions. We have actually enhanced that right through the ability to now be more adequately informed on the issues from which our original opinions stem.

A second concern that people seem to have with technology is that it supposedly constricts creativity. This is not true. Creativity is a fundamental characteristic of the human mind. It is always present, and always constant; it merely shifts forms. Creativity is simply the unique manipulation and interpretation of the world around us, rather digital or not. Creating a beautiful piece of abstract art in Photoshop is done through the same fundamental characteristic of creativity that is used in painting a watercolor. Some would argue that this is not true, saying that in the case of Photoshop you are simply using a program to create a product that is greatly restricted by the code that makes up the program itself. However, in the case of painting a watercolor are you not also constricted by the physical properties of a brush, paint, and so forth? There are always limiting factors, they just shift forms. Photoshop was designed as a photograph editor. Utilizing the abilities of the program in order to make abstract art from scratch is very creative. Though a watercolor painting and a Photoshop creation are very different in many aspects, the area of the brain utilized in making them is the same, and the end products are fundamentally alike. Furthermore, the internet fosters the means by which we can discover new and interesting ways to enhance our creative minds, through its network of resources pertaining to information on anything and everything of human interest.

The final point I would like to make is coming back to the misconception that as culture becomes increasingly digital, and advancements in technology become top priority, we lose touch with reality. Once again, I see it as quite the opposite. Technological advancements foster interest and deepening understanding of reality by means of scientific breakthroughs. The internet is a catalyst for these advancements, as a convenient source of an infinite wealth of knowledge on any field of interest. In the realm of technological advancements, some people say that we are focusing too much on mass media entertainment (through iPods, gaming consoles, etc.), and not enough on important issues such as medical ailments. However, people need to realize that the same technology being researched to go into the next iPod or Playstation is also the key to solving many medical mysteries. Faster silicon chips and memory modules, the key components of iPods and Playstations, will result in the ability to produce significantly faster and more effective supercomputers to complete such tasks as analyzing protein folding that could result in a better understanding of the causes of cancer. Its technology; and it’s all connected. Embrace it.

Becoming Digital

When I think of our digital society the first thing that comes to mind is the internet. The internet digitally connects the whole world. There are many applications that internet is used, yet more and more applications are created everyday. The web successfully converges all current media, new and old, by digitizing it and making media liquid. There is one internet company that survived the dot com bubble burst and is now in the forefront of making digital media easily accessible.

Google is one of the world’s largest internet search engine sites. They have been one of the fastest rising stocks over the past two years since going public. Google has been in recent news. Google is going to buy out YouTube, a popular video sharing site, for 1.65 billion dollars. This news appeared on October 10, 2006. On October 31, 2006, news broke out that will also be buying a small wiki startup company JotSpot. CNN reports that Google has spent over 130 million to acquire fifteen small companies last year. Are the predictions of Epic 2014 or Epic 2015 going to come to fruition?

Epic 2014 was created some time in mid-2004 when Google went public. Epic 2015 was created as a sequel and was made in late 2004 or early 2005. Both Epic videos are similar but the major difference is the outlook of the world when Google or actually “Googlezon” takes over the world. I believe Google is on the track of Epic 2015 with all the company buy outs. Google is cutting into Microsoft’s sector because they bought Upstartle, a company that made an online word-processing program and the new wiki software from JotSpot. Google now is creating a more marketable online alternative to Microsoft Office. They have already made Google Maps from another company they bought, Keyhole.

Even though it cannot be visibly seen as of right now if Google has integrate all the web technologies that they have acquired recently, a product similar to the “Google Grid” can be in the works at Google labs. It seems that Google is going to make our society even more digital. This is a mind blowing, but slightly depressing realization. It is like the commercial about GPS systems on a cell phone. The person is looking for a store and is using the cell phone for directions but when another person takes away the phone the person is completely lost until he gets the phone back. This commercial is hilarious right now but by Google creating an even more digital society, we may actually become completely lost without Google. Right now, I go in circles when I need to find problem set information and Google can’t find exactly what I need. I can’t really imagine if I were more immersed in the internet or a new similar digital personalized media device such as “EPIC”.

“EPIC” or the “Google Grid” can be scary things if they can be made by Google. A central digital place, where people can access edit, publish, search and store their life can become reality. The digital world would be reality and that is when we become digital. Some people may hold out, but eventually they will give in like Facebook or MySpace. Becoming a more digital society may lead to a lack of reality. Someone needs to stop Google before they create the “Grid”.

Using Digital Technology

Looking around today, it is hard to believe that about 100 years ago, there were not even cars to facilitate travel. The world around us is filled with technology and this technology makes our lives easier. At what point, however, does this abundance of technology begin to take away from our lives? I would argue that there is a potential for technology to overshadow everything else, but that that point has not yet been reached.

Almost everything that I do has been made better by technology. Whether it is school work that benefits from using a word processor and the internet, or figuring out my expenses on a monthly basis where I can use a spreadsheet, technology is very important. Although I am somewhat dependent on the media around me, I do not think that this is a bad thing. Technology has progressed enough that technology is reliable and trustworthy. Another example of digital media in my life is how I learn about the world around me. I watch television at night and check internet news sites throughout the day. It is difficult to imagine a world without radio or television or the internet. Newspapers are nice, but they are slow and it can be a drag to read all of the articles to find ones that are pertinent to my life. Television and the internet present information in a condensed manner and I do not have to deal with large unwieldy pages of a newspaper.

I am okay with my life being so dependent on digital media. I still think that there is no substitute for face to face interactions with other people. If I ever get to the point where I look forward to checking email or surfing the internet more than I look forward to meeting new people, then I think that there will be a problem. For the time being, the ease of email or the facility of the internet is a welcome shortcut to phone calls or meetings or newspapers. Until technology becomes an addiction, it will remain useful. However, once it becomes an addiction, I think that productivity will drastically decline; I am productive now because I can turn off my cell phone and computer and finish a problem set.

So far, technology and digital media have only helped me to become more productive: I have no problem using this technology as much as possible to make my life easier. At some point in the future, technology may overwhelm many people and begin to control their lives. When that happens, (and it probably has happened to some people) I think that these people have to be reminded that the real world has more than 1’s and 0’s could ever express. While technology is very useful, I think that there is a potential for it to become all-encompassing in the future. Because we have not yet reached this point, technology continues to serve as a great tool in most of my daily activities. I look forward to learning more about technology and leveraging it to make my jobs a little bit easier in the future.

Becoming Digital!!!!

Becoming Digital
Our society is continuously becoming digital. New technologies appear every day; constantly moving us toward a world of total immersion in electronics. Print media is out of style and antiquated; replaced with digital media.
Digital media has the advantage of receiving a constant influx of information. Online news sources are updated throughout the day. People (or web crawling computers) discover the most abstract news articles and sources and bring them together on aggregate sites to make viewing easier for the average user.
It seems like in our modern society, the internet and media in general are shifting towards providing an individual with information and news that is specifically tailored to his interests. Already my Google home page is customized to provide me with the information I deem essential to start my day. The news I want in fields I’m interested in is delivered to me right when I open my browser. Websites have already started tracking personal preferences, returning news or items which you were previously interested in; where will it stop? EPIC 2014 already made the eerie “prediction” that websites can and will start aggregating fake data more to interest its readers than to actually provide information. Legitimate news sources will be beat out by this sensationalist fake reporting.
And, in the future, if we are absorbed by this barrage of media, living our lives constantly immersed in digital words, where is the line drawn? How far can we step back from reality? Would we ever actually let ourselves get to the point of immersion in eXistenz? Actually removed from reality in a digital world that seems so real you start to question your own feelings?
A lot of ideas we have discussed and the examples we have watched demonstrate a general fear for the future of technology; a fear of total immersion. However, I have more faith in the human race. I don’t see humans losing themselves and losing reality in technology. I still and always will see it as an aid, not an escape. So far, the internet has been built up and molded on convenience. Most new features exist to make things faster and easier to access, not to take away a sense of reality. And this won’t change anytime soon.
We are the masters of technology, not the other way around. In most people’s modern lives, human//human interactions make up the bulk of our memories and experiences. Something drastic would have to happen to our society and values to change our goals toward total digital immersion and I don’t believe that something is going to happen.

Hive (based on EPIC 2014)

2016 The grassroots Free of Information Initiative (FII) starts The Tree, a vision of a worldwide network where any two users can share information with perfect anonymity or with perfect confidence in each other’s identity. The project attracts hackers, software engineers, and security experts from around the world.

2018 The Tree is perfected into Hive, the holy grail of secure communications. The system can hide not only the nature, but the existence of interaction between any two or more users. The Hive is built over the existing architecture of the World Wide Web. It has no central servers - every computer connected to the Hive is part of it.

2022 Seven out of eight personal computers connect to the Hive. The Hive grows and swallows the World Wide Web.

2023 The Sinclair media conglomerate builds it Clarity database, which collects and stores demographic information for each person alive to target media to him or her. Everything from where one lives to how many holes ones socks have is in the database. Media is flooded with ads targeted to a degree never previously imagined.

2026 The FII announces that 87% of known media objects, whether historical or newly released, can be found in the Hive network. The movie and recording industries can only watch as users upload and download media on Hive on a scale before possible. Paying for music and movies, information that can be copied at will, is considered absurd.

2027 The Clarity database is compromised and copied into the open-source Eye project and distributed for free. Any person can look up information on anyone. Privacy advocates cry foul.

2027 Multiple projects, including Eye, Wikipedia, FreeGoogle, combined into the FII-sponsored Truth, a collaborate project to organize and catalogue all knowledge.

2028 This contentious presidential election was the first to have the Hive as its main medium. Every person wants his or her view heard. Supporters of each candidate flood the networks with propaganda, demographically-targeted using Truth. Real issues are ignored as the network is flooded with sensationalism and lies.

2029 The newly-formed Truth shocks the Chinese public with the extent of the country’s human rights abuses. The Chinese government fights to regain “information control” through increasingly draconian measures that, by 2031, lead to China’s complete digital isolation from the world.

2030 The Truth project becomes increasingly filled with false information on a scale that makes maintaining its accuracy impossible. Verity is founded by entrepreneur Kevin Krone amidst the increasing amount of spam, junk, and lies on the Hive. Organizations pay to have Verity send out field agents to verify facts with rigorous standards. Information marked a C in a circle, formerly the copyright symbol, is known to be confirmed, or “Veritified”. Two years later, half of Truth pages are Veritified.

2032 Four anonymous users post documents and photographs onto the Hive network that reveal secret CIA bargains with Turkmenistan to hide wrongdoing from UN inspectors in exchange for economic privileges. Verity confirms the allegations. These whisteblowers are hailed as heroes, despite being branded by the President as “unpatriotic traitors”.

2034 The FII creates Cypher, an open repository of modules and code. Every computer program, open source or legally proprietary, is translated into Sigma, a universal programming language that allows snippets of code to be combined seamlessly into any application imaginable. Writing programs from scratch is a remnant of the past.

2034 A resistance force builds up using the Hive system on Chinese computers. Demonstrations are organized anonymously, appearing suddenly and disappearing with no trace. Censorship is nothing more than a minor annoyance. Slowly, the government of China loses the information war.

2035 AOL/Time Warner invests enormous capital in selling content on the Hive. They protect their digital property with once First Limited Use (FLU), a breakthrough algorithmic advance in Digitial Rights Managements which makes data self-destruct after one use, in addition to preventing copying and ad removal. Other media companies soon follow.

2035 The US government blames the failure of a military operation in Turkmenistan to the enemy army picking up American military secrets shared on the Hive network. However, volunteer experts tracking and analyzing troop movements and fiscal flow point at gross incompetence by the armed forces.

2037 The programming community converges on Cypher to develop “antibiotics,” methods of circumventing FLU. Within months, every DRM’ed media file is disinfected and linked on the Hive network.

2028 Now on their last throes, media conglomerates unite a legal attack on the Hive. The case makes its way to the Supreme Court with the FII as nominal defendant. The case United States of America vs Hive Network is the largest and most complex case in history.

2039 Despite the support of the collective legal knowledge of the American public, Hive is declared illegal by a 7-2 vote. The Court claims the case is not just one of property law – the issue is that Hive is anarchy. It breaks every law because no law can be enforced when every interaction can be made secret. The dissenting opinion disagrees strongly, “Hive is democracy. No invention since the printing press has done so much for free speech.” However, the decision is a moot point. Hive is not a person or corporation that can be sanctioned. Hive is on every computer in existence. Hive is indestructible.

2039 The commercial media market is effectively dead, replaced by media created by groups of enthusiasts who direct movies and write plays for everyone’s enjoyment. The American Government promotes the arts with a patronage system that encourages invention and innovation, and other nations follow suit. Verity is charged with identifying projects with artistic merit worth funding, amidst the sea of garbage put out by well-meaning masses.

2043 China’s communist government collapses under the weight of freedom and truth. Other oppressive regimes fall soon after. Hive connects the world as one democracy.

Circa 2060 Verity is the arbiter of beauty and truth. It manipulates the Hive, slowly subverting reality, and becomes the de-facto world-government. Verity wields not power, but truth. How this transformation occurred is not fully understood.

Here, the record ends. All knowledge after this date may be lost forever.

you can love the digital world, but use it right!

Numerical Representation. Modularity. Quantification. It is still like magic to me how the digital world takes information from our real world and turns the information into portable, editable, and intangible files. I do not get how the moment I was with my sister was captured into a camera, converted into a series of 0’s and 1’s, and managed to play back on my computer. It is ridiculous to think that when I click on a movie sequence to be black and white, a bunch of mathematical formulas are at work to get rid of the color in my video. It is genius how digital media pixelates and quantifies the real world, because I can hardly tell when the real, continuous world becomes the digital, pixilated world.
However, it is different capturing life onto digital media than creating digital files from digital media. These include drawing things with Photoshop, drawing animations on Flash, or making models in AutoCAD. Digitally created files are less informative about the creator of a media since it is in the nature for digitally produced media to be easily reproducible by anybody. For example, if you ask a group of people to draw a line six inches long in AutoCAD, everyone’s lines will look identical. This line in AutoCAD was meant to be easily reproducible. One simply would need to type “L”, click enter, and type in “@6,0.” However, if you ask a group of people to draw a line six inches long on a piece of paper, everyone’s lines will look very different. Some people will have lines that are not so straight at certain areas, some will have really thick line weights, some will have tapered ends, and so forth. There are infinite ways in which humans could draw that line. The hand-drawn line is not easily reproduced like the AutoCAD line. For this reason, the hand-drawn line is more informative and unique to the creator of the line than is the AutoCAD line. If the line is wavy, one could suppose that maybe the creator was nervous. Or if the line is dark, one could suppose the creator maybe was really trying to emphasize this particular line.
So the question now is, when is it more appropriate to capture real life work digitally and when is it more appropriate to create files digitally? It all depends on if the creator is trying to reveal himself in his work or not. If one is trying to portray a part of himself as an art project, capturing real life work digitally would make sense. His real life work would be undeniably his own, and clearly not reproducible by any other artist. However, if one were trying to convey a design clearly and articulately, making a file digitally would be appropriate, since revealing information about the creator himself is not the focus. The design’s information is the focus. It does not matter so much that people realize the work was done uniquely by the creator. It matters more that people get the information. So the next time you choose a media to create your work, whether you decide to use a photograph for a poster or decide to make a graphic for a poster, ask yourself what you are trying to reveal – outside information or something about yourself?

Digital Immersion

Digital Immersion

Reality; this is perhaps the vaguest of human abstractions. In truth, none of us truly know that the other exists, or that an objective “reality” exists. Indeed, we cannot prove the existence of anyone but ourselves, and must be content in believing that reality is more than just our imagination. And yet, humanity continually attempts to thwart the thin strands that tie us to our reality through media. As media grows more powerful, the unreal becomes more real, simultaneously causing the real to become unreal as we become disillusioned with boring “reality.”

If we subscribe to Munovich’s thesis, then media is definitively becoming more variable and liquid, able to adapt to both the user and expand to fill whatever medium we wish it to encompass. Of course, the ultimate conclusion of such change is a media juggernaut, able to vary infinitely based on any user stimuli, fully immersing us into a reality that we can create and modify to any degree. Perhaps such a reality would even be more preferable, to some, than the objective reality which we perceive. This reality is woefully difficult for one person to modify to any significant degree.

Since life as we know it is based entirely upon perception, it is not entirely unreasonably to say that media immersion, which already takes up significant amounts of our time, will soon become the dominant aspect of our existence. That is, people will spend more time submerged in artificial realms than the objective reality. This situation could become so extreme that reality is replaced altogether, and people spend their lives in capsules reminiscent of a Matrix-esque imprisonment. Though such an analogy seems horrific, the possible benefits of such an existence are many.

Life in the objective reality follows no true rationale or purpose. The game is unfair: some people start out with more advantages than others, some people die earlier than others solely based on chance, and some people gain much more than others for far less effort. In a created media universe, none of these inequalities would exist unless somebody wanted them to exist. The game world would provide a clear objective, stemming the disillusionment that one feels with objective reality, as well as the removal of all dissatisfactory aspects of the normal world. The game world would provide each individual with what they believe to be the perfect life, which may be the entire purpose of life itself.

And yet, despite the obvious advantages of an artificially created reality, it seems that something fundamental about human nature will cause us to reject such a lifestyle. We may not even know that this reality is truly real, and yet we cling to it, not because it is perfect, but because it is infinitely variable. Though media may one day approach near-infinite levels of versatility, the limit can always be reached, reminding us that we do not have an entire freedom of choice. Thus, media may never become fully immersive, simply because human nature will not allow it. We prefer to live in an imperfect world, one of war, famine, and illness, over a perfect one, simply because imperfection belies free choice, which we must retain in order to remain happy.