Born Digital

I was not really able to relate with the first half of this reading, as I am in born in the digital age. What struck me most about this reading was the fact that the author had assumed the audience was someone of their own age. The reading Born Digital illustrates the different age generations, with respect to technological advancements. One of the developments relayed in this reading is that of the development of "bulletin board systems", which later gave way to the more popular forum, and from the concept related technologies emerged such as texting and Instant Messaging. In this digital age religious ceremonies are carried online, and entire support systems for churches are being designed and applied so that anyone in the world can access them. The reading goes on to discuss how individuals of the technology age shop online, rather than go to stores. Communicate through social networking sites, and how ultimately there is rather large gap of technological challenged people who still have to catch up. This work thoroughly illustrates how important it is to be born in a digital age, and to be brought up with technology. 

An original digital bulletin board system.

YouTube: Digital Media Artifact

In this day and age it is difficult to speak to anyone who has not heard of YouTube. The online internet video sharing platform first launched in February 2005 and since has achieved over 2 billion views per day (4) and according to Alexa the internet statistics company it is the globally ranked the third most viewed website in the world. YouTube was created as an avenue for users to easily share videos created by themselves or others. YouTube's user driven content model is the exact reason why I choose YouTube as my number one online information source. YouTube users often have specific goals or points that they which to communicate. From learning about mathematics, to watching comedy sketches YouTube is a plethora of information that is fully searchable and scalable.

Founded by three former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and financially backed by a 3.5 million dollar investment by the Sequoia Capital Investment Firm YouTube remains one of the fastest growing websites in internet history. It has users all over the world, and is easily accessible by anyone with a computer and an internet connect. It aims to bring the world together in a digital community. One can easily observe the digital organism that it has become by simple visiting the website for themselves.
Perhaps it is because of YouTube's accessibility and easy to user interface that the online gaming community has found it usefull for creating tutorial videos describing how to play through specific games. In fact just a single search into YouTube for "game walkthrough" produces about About 7,600,000 results. In fact entire channels are dedicated to these walk throughs  online cult communities are based on these channels, and more often than not there is more than a single walk through for any given game, all ultimately similar but by different users. You don't have to read Baudrillard to come to the realization that all of these videos regenerate over and over the same message in the exact same way until all original meaning is lost. A testimate to this fact is easily viewable by watching any video on YouTube and clicking on the "similar videos" suggestions at the end of every video.

In order to provide sufficient evidence that YouTube videos are in fact digital media artifacts, I would like to talk about a specific YouTube user, xNuclearGamingx, this particular user produces tutorial walkthroughs on the latest games, as well as new games that most YouTube users have never heard of. This particular user's selection of "indie games" as well as games designed by big name studios make him an up and coming credible source for new and potentially great games. Recently he posted a video tutorial walkthrough about the recently resleased video Borderlands 2. The walk through below: 

Based on Manovich's criteria for what constitutes a digital media artifact, it is clear that this YouTube channel is in fact a digital media artifact. Each video is digitally encoded and represented in binary form on YouTube's servers (Numerical Encoding, Manovich). After watching this video, algorithms recommend new videos to the viewer by xNuclearGamingx without needing human intervention. Therefore it is automatic. Because YouTube allows for variability, and it is modular, demonstrated as the content of the site changes every minute and the individual videos are interchangeable and even in some cases customization using a easy to use time-frame based annotation system. And because each video can be encoded in different formats for different media applications it has variability. In addition YouTube allows other users to comment on xNuclearGamingx's videos and profile thus creating a digital organism.(Manovich) If that's not enough the YouTube API offers individual website owners and developers the ability to fully format comments, videos and channels in any way that they wish. This digitalism/flexibility has given users like xNuclearGamingx the ability to embed their videos on websites and even upload videos from smart phones and other electronic sources.

I remember my first experience with YouTube, I was researching web programming, and one of the first search results that came up was a YouTube video on HTML programming. I don't remember the name of the user who uploaded it, but what I do remember is how clearly they spoke, how their video illustrated all of the key points that auditory learning alone could not fulfill and how easy it was to view other videos about the same topic. There was something magical about learning something for free. I think in some respects that's why I started to use YouTube it felt wrong, like learning something new shouldn't be that easy, or free. This same idea can be applied to the tutorial walkthroughs provided by xNuclearGamingx, by purchasing the game and broadcasting his game play it gives users a chance to decide based on his game play whether or not they want to purchase the video game. 

With the discovery of new technologies which enabled screen recording, YouTube became a haven for online academic learning tutorials which eventually were carried on over to gaming industry. Like the videos produced by xNuclearGamingx these videos allow for the monetization of game publishers games as users like xNuclearGamingx demonstrate and in some cases promote their games. By utilizing the concept of "instant and global self publishing" as described by Sullivan , YouTube gives users like xNuclearGamingx the ability to express themselves and to promote their personal views and opinions and to organize their ideas and thoughts in a digital organism.

Medium With The Massage

Quentin Fiore, Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium Is The Massage" is a conceptual overview of media, in all its forms. From clothing to books, to television and telephones media is all around us and apart of us. It is this unique approach to defining media that makes this literary work an informative and thought provoking read. It does not matter if you are the slowest reader or the fastest, this book clearly relates its message in volumes through photos and extensive observational points. On page 26 you will find a message formulated to both inspire and bring to consciousness to your dulled sense. "All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical." The base of this message can be best described in the self contained phonetic sense of early humans which was the cause for much confusion and irritation. The lack of ability with respect to formulating ideas and opinions and relating them only by voice led to the creation of the pen and quill which in turn gave birth to newer more modern forms of communication, just like the discovery of the alphabet gave way to grammatical independence, so did the telephone the tape recorder and the television. Each replaced the psyche senses with a less restrictive and burdensome form of communication, thus removing the need for volumes of information, ideas and concepts to be stored in memories of their holders.

"The medium is the massage" courtesy of Google.

SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS

SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS  by JEAN BAUDRILLARD
is a wonderful example of why someone needs to take all of the documents written by old school scholars and re-write them into modern day socially acceptable 10th grade English. When I first attempted reading this work I was baffled by how many of the words I did not know, as I got further into the paper I realized that it was going to take me multiple readings to grasp the full curriculum of what the author was teaching. Simulacra "is a slight unreal, or superficial likeness or semblance" in 10th grade English this basically means that something is "similar". This concept is perhaps the most strongly relayed in Jean's overall view of the current state of affairs. He presents the idea that idol ism with respect to "God" as an idea of symbolism or what he believes to be initially a thought, feeling or idea as a man made physical manifestation which in its similarisim it becomes in some cases the overall embodiment of "God". Basically he is stating that the way things are today, are that way because of imitation, and all real world values are lost thought the iterations of time, slowly pseudo-genetically altered to fit the idealism of prominent individuals and their parties.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard

Fuckall

So I had a slightly shitty week thus far, and I'm going to share it with who ever decides to read this.

Shitty Thing #1)
Chegg, that wonderful book leading and selling place everyone hears about fucked me over royally. I ordered a book from with a Wiley Plus Registration card from them on 9/04, what I received on Friday was a book but no registration card. (online homework was already past due) So I was pissed, started a live support session with one of their reps who told me "Sorry, well ship you a new book", even when I said all I needed was the registration card they said they still had to ship me a new book." So I said fine, waited 4 more days and on the 11th I got an email from Chegg:

"  Hi Cody,
We are sorry to inform you, but 1 or more of the item(s) in your order #none of your business could not be shipped from our warehouse. A refund has been issued to the payment method used to place the order.  Please allow 3-5 business days for this credit to post to your account. "

"

My internal translation of that email is as follows:
"Dear Cody,
Sorry we fucked up, here have a cookie."

I know what you are thinking, what the hell does a cookie have to do with anything. Well it doesn't, but Chegg's lack of inventory management is bullshit, and I had to pay $95.00 to Wiley Publishing for the registration card. So Fuck you Chegg, I'm keeping the book you asked me to ship back as payment for putting up with your shit.

Shitty Thing #3)

Google... Sometimes you make me so mad that I could kill a flock of chickens by making them eat KFC.
So I was responding to an email using GMail, a very important decide your future type of email. My email response is pretty long right, nice and grammatically correct, I get to what is pretty much the bottom of the scrollbox, and  I click to fix a word, well instead of the word, due to someones fucked up calculations in padding text boxes, my click lands on the send button, why in the FUCK would you put a send button right below the fucking text box, no vertical spacing what so ever. Below is my internalization & thought process of this incident:

"Good email so far, must fix spelling error, right click activated, wait.... what the fuck, did that just really. well  hope they cant spell."

Shitty Thing #4)

IT User Services, oh how I want to dump you.
Ever since the start of this semester and MTU's new 100% Wireless Campus Crusade my internet has been shit-tastic, in fact I didn't have internet for the first 2 days of the semester. I've called them 3 times, filed a complaint in person, and today the 13th nearly 1 week later I get a response to my ticket.

"Cody,
I understand your frustration with not being able to connect to the wireless. I will have this issue assessed and resolved as soon as possible. The issue is most likely due to an unknown wireless network. I will relay this info the the appropriate person and have the unknown wireless access points shut down. Thanks again for your patience. "

This is the same bullshit line that they have kept feeding me,
I can still see the wireless access points, I can connect to them. Do I have to manually knock on each door in the dorms enforcing the policy of no wireless access points (user services asked me not to), how long is this going to take. Will I be forced to live in the labs this year because User Services can't get their shit together, its a pretty easy fix send some muscle to find the punks who are disrupting my wireless signal. I deserve more than 2 bars damnit!



So yeah, I could probably be doing homework right now or the actual assigned blog post, but I'm too drained from dealing with fuckall to do so, so hopefully I get some recognition for this awesome post, or real cold hard canvas points would be swell too.

As We May Think

Upon reading as we may think, I immediately find myself entranced by this authors ability to almost seemingly foretell the future. While futurists like Jacque Fresco who portrayed the future as quite alien, that they had the  the author VANNEVAR BUSH relates many of his concepts in his 1945 Essay "As We May Think" to technological advancements of our present time. Combining futuristic goals with problems of the past Vannevar is able to make the connections between photography and digital photography very easily. He is able to predict that through modernism and industrialization that technology will get cheaper and better. In his article whether it is stated that he believes that scientific research intended for war will be applied towards the common good. Vannevar  is very good at expressing his views on future inventions, as well as distinguishing the need for some things to stay modernized and simple.

All in all I think this was a pretty good article its a shame I didn't have more time to post about it.

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