Yearly Archives: 2010
Understanding New Media – Multimedia
With every tool, man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or removing limits to their functioning. – Sigmund Freud (1929). Veltman, Kim H. Understanding New Media: Augmented Knowledge & Culture. University of Calgary Press, 2006. Veltman lists the major functions of computers as their ability to perform calculations, write, visualize, create multimedia,…
Technopoly – The Academic Course
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage, 1993. Another take-away from Technopoly is somewhat oddly-founded, as it is based on a bit of a tangent that Postman pursues as an example of technologies coming in disguise (in Chapter 8: Invisible Technologies). He discusses the idea of academic courses in the educational world….
Technopoly
“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely he way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant” (48). Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage, 1993. In Technopoly, Postman discusses the role of…
College Students on Streaming Video: Get Me Outta Class!
Nearly a third of college students reported that their parents or guardians would be “very upset” to know how little they actually attend classes in person. College Students on Streaming Video: Get Me Outta Class! Here is an article posted on the campus technology site last week, which offers a great conversation starter on the…
What is New Media? – 3
A colleague of mine recently suggested that New Media is everything newer than the pencil. However, I cannot accept such a simple definition; all media is new at some point. To the chirographic era, the pencil was new media, as was the Gutenberg press. Being that so many new media forms have arisen over the…
What is New Media? – 2
Using my previous post on Interactivity as a launching point, I decided to revisit the topic of new media, which has much to do with interactivity. In May 2008, I addressed What is New Media and noted that it was a bit difficult to define it… and then defined it. New media can still be…
Cyberculture – Interactivity
Lévy, Pierre. Cyberculture. Electronic Mediations, V. 4. Minneapolis, Minn.; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ‘In this brief chapter, Lévy address the topic of interactivity, including the problem of defining it, and the various levels of interactivity. For example, even an individual seated on a c ouch, watching television is interacting with that medium to…
Cyberculture – Dimensions of Communication
Lévy, Pierre. Cyberculture. Electronic Mediations, V. 4. Minneapolis, Minn.; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Having had varying amounts of confusion defining certain elements and categorizations of the online video conversation (OVC), such as whether it is a medium, a method of communication, a genre, etc., I have found in Cyberculture an excellent approach to…
Cyberculture
Levy, Pierre. Cyberculture. Electronic Mediations, V. 4. Minneapolis, Minn.; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, “Technology is responsible for neither our salvation nor our destruction. Always ambivalent, technologies project our emotions, intentions, and projects in to the material world. The instruments we have built provide us with power, but since we are collectively responsible, the…
Infinity Imagined
“This digital age belongs to the graphic interface, and it is time for us to recognize the imaginative work that went into that creation, and prepare ourselves for the imaginative breakthroughs to come” (215). Johnson, Steven A. Interface Culture. Basic Books, 1997. Infinity Imagined In the final chapter of this 1997 text, Johnson discusses many…