Class notes 9/16/10

In today’s class we discussed non-text media: images, audio (including music), video (including TV and movies) and multimedia.

The websites we discussed are below, and I also snapped a picture of the whiteboard with our discussion question and some of the ideas you shared during discussion (click to see a larger version of the image):

• Visual imagery has also moved from print to digital, and many museums feature images from their collections on their websites, like the Brooklyn Museum (click the Collections link). Also note that the museum has a blog on which it publishes news + interacts with the community, and uploads images to Flickr as well.

• Photo sharing websites like Flickr are another way that images can be distributed digitally. Flickr is also an example of user-generated content — photos are uploaded by users and tagged with keywords to facilitate searching.

• Many radio stations now broadcast via the internet as well as over the airwaves, like WFMU, a radio station in New Jersey.

• Apple’s iTunes service is one of the major distributors of digital audio and video content (including music and podcasts).

• Major label, smaller label and independent (unsigned) musicians in all genres have embraced MySpace as a way to distribute their music and gain new fans. (And, of course, MySpace is a social networking website, too.)

• Course lectures and other academic podcasts (audio and video) are also increasingly available online. Academic Earth is website that aggregates content from universities and colleges; iTunes U provides a similar service.

• Of course, YouTube is one of the most popular ways that digital video can be distributed. It features everything from home videos to academic lectures to music videos and more.

• The Please Rob Me project aggregated data from Twitter and foursquare (a location-aware web service) and presented it as an ever-expanding list of home burglary opportunities. It’s a pretty clever comment on some of the privacy issues that can arise from using these media in new ways.

Blog Response 3

Digital technologies have introduced us to a whole new realm of production, journalism and source of entertainment-in which generous amounts are actually “unfiltered content“. In Pavlik’s exerpt Producers of Digital Media, Pavlik stress-that anyone can produce any form of digital media, such as audio, digital photographs and video. In the field of audio-anyone can produce their own full length songs and upload them as pod casts,  on their own website or even on itunes. Digital photographs- digital photographs can be done by literally anyone who owns a camera phone-examples of amature photography as Pavlik mentions are, the “London subway bombing and the Asian tsunami” (p80). And for amature photographers with nikons, designers and artists- Flickr is our best resource to upload, share  and get critiqued on the work we present with people around the world.

The last field is video. Videos taken by amatures which eventually-makes its way from mobile to mobile and later on the news, being so even the news have made its way to becoming viral on the web lately. Whether its Michael Richants racist remark sent to TMZ, Saddam Hussein’s execution, BBC News weather men  sticking his middle finger on live tv, or the latest video of Antoine Dodson’s now famous rant “You better hide your kids, hide your wife, cause they raping everybody here in Alabama“-(this video went viral within 24 hours), it doesn’t take professionals to film and upload. Yahoo has actually created a website called Reuters.com for these categories of videos.

I found the following most intriguing- its another form of publishing video content on the web by creating fan videos-in which dedicated fans create their own parodies of their favorite shows or film. Although these fans are not traditional filmmakers, they are able to use digital technology to create accurate imitations of the setting, look-alike actors to play the role and add special effects. A popular fan series out there right now would be Star Trek. As a long time Star Trek fan, I wasn’t quite aware that there was something like this out there. I wonder if there’s anything like this for LOST fans?

-SSIRA9018

Subject Headings:

TR-Photography

M-Music