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.”

Blog 6

Jenkins starts off by what the book is about and key terms that he will be discussing he states “This book is about the relationship between three concepts—media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.”  We can relate this with Weinberger statement- “We have taken technology and the power of the masses into a whole different level “crowdsourcing”.  We are able to use information and manipulate it anyway we want, whenever we want and most importantly now!” On page two Jenkins states “Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”

Jenkins defines convergence as follows: By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”  Later on his work he states that “Convergence is, in that sense, an old concept taking on new meanings.”  I think that he is describing our age of mixing old things with new things.  

In turn, media convergence impacts the way we consume media. A teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scan the Web, listen to and download MP3 files, chat with friends, word-process a paper, and respond to e-mail, shifting rapidly among tasks.  We can see how this may tie up within term of how we organize our lives and our work today.  We can tie this up with what Weinberger said:  “In the digital age, computers have become demonically good at sorting through gigantic, complex piles of information” (pg 85).  

Weinberger believes that all miscellaneous has a place if there is a place for it as he described in his orders of order. Jenkins states “Now, convergence has reemerged as an important reference point as old and new media companies try to imagine the future of the entertainment industry. If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in ever more complex ways.” Almost everything that we organize has been organized by someone else thus we create something new from something old to define us. 

 “In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.” Jenkins I think these holds true on the Splashy pants and Old Spice advertising success. 

Blog #5

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“It is inevitable that we tend to focus on what is said and not on the unsaid that enables it, since as soon as we pay attention to the implicit, it becomes explicit…..We call the implicit the context or the background.

So the term implicit is used to describe what is not being said or what we don’t see taking affect to
making something explicit. Implicit is something we understand from words.  Weinberger gives an example when he talks about the traffic signs.  “In order to help the sign’s meaning become implicit. R reading a sign takes longer than “getting” the symbol.  When a symbol has become a part of our vocabulary, we don’t stumble and fumble as we try to understand it.  It’s simply a part of the meaning of the word.  It enters our context our backgrounds” (pg 151).   

Explicit meaning is when the words tell you exactly what is going on around or to point out to something that is real, concepts that are very specific and not open to interpretation. Weinberger explains when he gives his example of one person finding out a away to get from A to B.  “Before you know it, it’s 1914, cars are running on roads that used to be paths, and the Automobile Club of Southern California decides it needs to mark the way from Kansas City to Los Angeles with four thousand signs.  The implicit is made very explicit” (pg 150)

Folksonomy is just simply how people tag things onlune.  “…Thomas Vander Wal coined the term folksonomy in 2005 to mean an ordered se of categories (or “taxonomy”) that emerges from how people tag items” (pg 165). 

Weinberger explains the importance of all three terms relating to the third order of order in his context.  “In the third order, the content and the metadata are all digital” (pg 171).

“That implicit we of relationships gives the things of our world their meaning” (pg 170)

"The meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world" (170).

“The value of the potential, implicit ways of ordering the digital miscellany
dwarfs the value of any particular actualization” (pg 171).

Folksonomy in relation to rest of the terms and the importance is the fact that people tag things giving it some kind of digital order which follows under the third order of orders and the organization of the miscellaneous.

Blog #4

There are many connections among Weinberger’s ideas and the “what is Web 2.0” and “web Squared.”  Weinberger’s ideas focus on organization and the impact of the three orders or order and the four new characteristic principles.  “What is Web 2.0” sets the stage of the internet being used as a platform to reach out to different people.  “Web Squared” talks about how the internet is a collective mind and its constantly learning from all the users.  Here are some similarities that I found in all of the three reading.  

 

Weinberger- “On line, on the other hand, we just naturally expect to organize information our
way, through tags, bookmarks, playlist, and weblogs.  And then we add to the information that a site provides us by disagreeing with it in our own review” (pg 106).

 

Web 2.0- “There’s an implicit “architecture of participation,” a built in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connectiong the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.”

“On torrents and P2P sharing networks “the service automatically gets better the more people use it”

Web Squared- “Chief among our insights was that “the network as platform” means far more than just offering old applications via the network (“software as a service”); it means building applications that literally get better the more people use them, harnessing network effects not only to acquire users, but also to learn from them and build on their contributions.”

All three of the authors of their respected article talked about the importance and the impact of collective information that was created from the internet as a “platform.”  

The next few quotes I believed that they tied up by talking about real time and how it’s the big thing that is happening right now. 

Web 2.0- “The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location,
identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces.  

“Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency.”

Web Squared- “Collective intelligence applications depend on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time.” 

 

“Think of sensor-based applications as giving you superpowers. Darkslide gives you super eyesight, showing you photos near you. iPhone Twitter apps can “find recent tweets near you” so you can get super hearing and pick up the conversations going on around you.

“Our cameras, our microphones, are becoming the eyes and ears of the Web, our motion sensors, proximity sensors its proprioception, GPS its sense of location."

Weinberger- “In the digital age, computers have become demonically good at sorting through gigantic, complex piles of information” (pg 85)."We have taken technology and the power of the masses into a whole different level “crowdsourcing”.  We are able to use information and manipulate it anyway we want, whenever we want and most importantly now! Weinberger describes in his four characteristics of knowledge and how we decide to organize information and share it with the world.

First: traditional knowledge is that just as there is one reality, there is one knowledge, the same for all.

Second:  We’ve assumed that just as reality is not ambiguous, neither is knowledge.  If something
isn’t clear to us, then we haven’t understood it.

Third: Because knowledge is as big as reality, no one person can comprehend it. So we need people who will act as filters, using their education,
experience, and clear thinking. 

Fourth: Experts achieve their position by working their way up through social institutions (pg 101)

“The way we’ve organized knowledge has been largely determined by these four properties of knowledge.” 

My MUZIK Folder

As I sit here looking at how un-organized my organized music folder is I can think of many ways someone else can actually do a better job at organizing my “Muzk” folder.  I looked at one of my folders labeled “Newest Muzik” I have random music genre and artist in that folder in different languages.  Some subfolders within the “My Muzik” folder are labeled by artist but the rest are categorized by rhythm I guess.  If I can’t dance to it I have it in either “Juzz Muzik,” “Chillaxin Muzik,” of “Cruizing” folder.  I have a folder that contains Spanish music that is not well organized. The only one I have organized is my favorite music genre which is Bachata.  My music library is organized in a way that labels the music that I listen to the most in a more appealing unique way that will automatic catch my eye and let me access it quickly. I guess if someone saw my music folder can say I’m a little bit unorganized but to me is organized in a way that the music that I listen to the most is accessible to me.
I guess another person is patient and meticulous and organized he/she can put everything in alphabetical order, either by title, composer or performer and then by the actual genre not just Spanish and English.  Another idea could be by rating if I listen to specific music more than other I can give them a rate and just organize the music that way.  Someone can also organize by the style of music.  Regardless of the way that the person organizes my music library it has to be in a way that my music that I like the most is easy accessible to enjoy.   I like almost all kinds of music but I think that the best way that I can or anyone can organize my music library would be by genre. 

Blog 2 Weinberger Ch.1-2

Weinberger on chapter 1 elaborates on how the world is and started out being miscellaneous and we have worked hard to getting it organized.  We can see how this plays out on the music industry as the world and iTunes music store being us constantly organizing it to fit our needs.  He believes that everything has a place as long as we put it in the right place and take the time to do so.  He states that we invest so much time in making sure our world isn’t miscellaneous in part because disorder is inefficient, but also because it feels bad.  It helps to be organized if we can keep everything organized our lives can move smoothly and proficient in our fast pace technology society.

He also focuses on the Three Orders of Order:  He states that in the first order of order, we recognize themselves in his example being the images and negatives of the Bettmann’s Archives.  So we know that they are objects and they are organized in some kind of order that makes sense.  The second order of order states that they use a catalog that points to the physical place where the first-order-of-order is stored in the back room.  The third and final order consists of content being digitized and how it removes the limitations we’ve assumed were inevitable in how we organize information.

On chapter 2 Weinberger starts off on how difficult it has been to come up with a universal alphabet that we can all use and understand making communication easier across cultures so to simply summarize that section alphabetization is very difficult.  He focuses on how we organize our world in a natural order that reflects on our needs and our “world.  Our technology and the three orders of orders help us categorize and organize the physical order to help us be more efficient though in a different way on his comparison with Amazon and Dewey's ideas.  He gives a few examples like Dewey’s idea to simply to have a single, universal way of cataloging book, one that all libraries would use.

One thing that I find myself constantly organizing is my music folder.  I have simply named it “My Muzik” folder I have about 14 different categories of genre.  It funny if you saw it you would be like what the “F*&#” because I have weird labels like “Juzz Muzik,” Chillaxin Muzik” and “Juzz Muzik” among other subfolders.  It works for me because if a song doesn’t follow on any of my genres like “Old Skoo” or Reggeaton  I “juzz” hrow it on any of those folders but it depends what language it is because I also have a folder that says “Muzica Espanol” which just random Spanish music go to and vice versa with the English music. It works for me though sometimes I don’t know where to put some music though and just throw it in the “Juzz Muzik” folder.  The system works every time I get a new song it has to have the artist name, the name of the song, genre and length of the song and once I have verified that I can put it in a folder.  I find myself organizing my music folder a lot because I’m constantly getting new music and getting new ideas of labeling the music folders.

Real Time

To me the most important idea of the article is “The
Rise of Real Time: A Collective Mind” section. We already know that our society wants everything “now” we are a fast
pace society that if we don’t know something within seconds we in a sense fall
back and need to update what we thought we knew.  The internet gives us a “gateway” or a “window”
that opens the world at a click of a button and when we click this button we
want to know whats “actually happening” (real time) not what happen. 

I find this interesting…. “Businesses
must learn to harness real-time data as key signals that inform a far more
efficient feedback loop for product development, customer service, and resource
allocation.” This is what’s happening right now, real time information that can be seen anywhere in the world.  Recently I have been purchasing some car parts for my car and I noticed that in  everywebsite I went there was a logo or a link to a live chat person.  So if I have any questions on the item I wished to purchase I could talk to someone live at that moment versus trying to call them. 

Real time is become huge phenomenons that if we don’t get on board, we as the new
generation will fall back and feel like in the “technological stone age.”

My current favorite web application that I discovered last year is a website (veetle.com) which allows users to stream “channels.”  I’m not sure if it will have legal issues later because users stream movies that may be in theaters or haven’t come out on DVD yet.  I’m usually not at home neither are my
roommates so we don’t have cable or anything like that.  So I discovered the website and it has been
very entertaining.  It has a variety of channels from sports to bar channels (very boring by the way). 

On this website you can either be a provider or a user.  You can broadcast files, DVDs, Webcams, TV or anything that can be streamed online.   I’m already paying for internet so there areno fees to pay I just had to download their media player and then pick a channel and start watching.  Is a very cheap way to enjoin a movie or a TV show.