BLOG 7

deBourgoing’s touches on different means of communication within the Hip Hop community and how it has changed with new up and coming artists and their usage of digital means to communicate directly with their fans.  She touches on the affects of transmedia on the “LA renaissance” movement with the help of new digital means of expression and the evolvement across different platforms.  She seems to argue the validity of the role of new technology medium and the power that allows an artist to evolve to its own style.  Technology and it’s perks allows artist to cut the middle man and allows the fans to interact more directly (Twitter).   She elaborates on the seven practices of transmedia inspired by her observation of the LA movement.

1. Spread your brand: Open Mic

2. Keeping it real: be authentic yet marketable

3. Be the change you want to see

4. Collaborate

5. It ain't hard to tell

6. It's a man's world but it would be nothing without a woman

7. We were scholars before colleges

deBourgoing’s article relates to the first half of the material covered in class on many aspects she mentions how promotional media has turned to services such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, being used by artist to cut the middle man.  She uses transmedia (Twitter, Facebook) as a means for artist to promote their selves and to be better known to the community or anyone that is interested in their products.  “Twitter more than Facebook is a fertile terrain for transactions of all sorts: business, artists to artists, fans to artists, artists retweeting other fans. It's used for promotion, casual conversations, to express opinions, and indicate what the artists are up to.”  We can see how it relates to Real Time everyone wants to know what their favorite artist is doing or will be doing within the next 30 minutes and artist are willing to post or tweet what they are about to do.  We can argue that these social network services are multiple media platforms which can distribute content to or from multiple media industries to everyone in that “scene”.  Its interesting because these new trends and platforms type of medias can be categorized and organized in its own media platforms Facebook uses comments and post and Twitter uses tweets and everyone is re-using the wheel to come up with something different.  

Everything thus far that we have studied has to do with collaboration, the wisdom of the crowd, crowd sourcing, and organizing “music” defined by emotions.  On Rhythm Science Paul Miller expresses different ideas on this section of the book he goes from reading to writing, to writing to dj-ing and poetry to rhythm.  I find page 64 the most meaningful section and the one section that explains his ideas on the new “multiplex consciousness” generation.  We have jumped around from wisdom of the crowd to organizing our media folders and explaining why we organized it the way we have trying to explain the layers of complexity.  I cannot paraphrase his words so I’ll just quote Miller.  “The multiplex consciousness of rhythm science adds several layers of complexity: the “current”- all puns intended, alternating and direct- has been deleted.  Any sound can be you.  It’s an emotion of abstraction and attention deficit disorder.  There’s so much information about who you should be or what you should be that you’re not left with the option of trying to create a mix of your very self. ….The mix absorbs almost anything it can engage – and much that it can’t.   I think that this paragraph describes a lot of what we have discussed in class thus far.  We are a “current” generation that mixes and remixes things by collaborating old and new ideas to invent new forms of “music” or innovations that represent us.

Miller “you can always squeeze something out of the past and make it becomes new.”