Guitars and Kanes

Ahh, the grand open post. The world truly is our oyster for blogposts such as these. An interesting guitar story happened to me this past weekend. Last week, I learned one of my favorite songs of all time. The song is Narcolepsy by Third Eye Blind. I hadn’t learned this song before now, since it called for a complete retuning of my guitar. I decided to bite the bullet and retune it, and I was pretty happy I did. I learned the song and got it down pretty well, since I didn’t want to go to the trouble of re-retuning my guitar. Then, on Saturday, I was rocking out pretty hard and broke my third from bottom string. This is the first time I’d broken a string since obtaining my guitar this summer, so it was kind of a momentous event. I luckily had a spare set of strings, and I proceeded to switch the strings on my guitar. I started from the bottom, and replaced the first two strings. Then, working on the third string, it snapped. This was the same string that I broke in the first place, so I didn’t have any sort of replacement string. I thought I was in quite the predicament. Luckily there was still enough of the new string to make it work and the rest of the string replacement went off without a hitch. The new strings are all on, and they sound great.

This week, in my film class, we watched Citizen Kane. This movie is regarded by many as the greatest American film of all time. I had never seen the entire film before and I was a little unsure what to expect. After viewing it though, I was quite impressed. The story was interesting and the cinematography was outstanding. It really was a beautiful film. Upon immediate viewing I wasn’t too impressed with the film, but thinking about it afterwards really let the movie grow on me. It’s quite impressive the amount of art and thought that was put into a film like this over 60 years ago. If you get the chance, I recommend this film. Even if you don’t hold it in as high of a regard as others, it’s still a large piece of cinematic history.

Power

This week, we read an article by Duncan Watts entitled “The Connected Age.” I found this article to be very interesting and thought provoking. I thought about how Watts said that in our day and age we have accumulated a vast number of devices and services to make our lives better and easier. While this seems undoubtedly true, I started thinking that these things could, in fact, make our lives more busy and stressful. It seems like these days, everyone is on their blackberry or cell phone, scurrying around, always in a hurry. Things in the past just seem more simple and laid back. It seems like pretty ironic that the inventions and services designed to make our lives easier might actually be the stress bringers that we’ve been trying to avoid.

I also enjoyed the part about the electrical network. I never really thought about the fact that we have a monstrous grid of power lines that allow us to do everything that we’re used to doing. Watts wrote about a 25-hour blackout in New York City in 1977. Riots busted out and millions of dollars in damages were accrued. It made me feel pretty scared to think about what might happen today, in an age when we’ve relied on electronics like never before. Watts then told of a huge power outage on the west coast in 1996. This one was more of a chain of events. One power line touched a tree, causing it to blow. This put stress on other power lines, causing them to blow, and so on. It was nice just reading some stories in this article. I liked not trying to have to interpret what the author meant, but merely hearing a tale. Watts also talked about how the individual parts of power aren’t too hard to understand, but it’s the system as a whole that is extremely complex and unpredictable. This is much the same as a crowd of football fans or stock market investors. I found this idea especially interesting. It seems counter intuitive that we could understand everything about individual parts of a system, but the system as a whole can still boggle our minds. It seems like connecting people, ideas, or things together can have consequences that we could never dream of.

Robots and Artifacts

This week we had a couple readings by Katherine Hayles. I thought the reading on material metaphors was especially interesting. I’ve always thought the field of robotics was interesting and scary. It seems like such a good idea to create things that have the intelligence of us, and can do great things for us. It is also a scary idea that we could create, build, and enjoy things that would eventually lead to our demise. I never really thought about copying someone’s whole mind into a computer program as described in this reading. I found the story about the CEO creating a boardroom with screens to put his copy into an interesting idea. It made me think of the book iRobot. We try to create these contraptions to help us, but we don’t look ahead to what problems they could cause.

I also found the part about describing the book interesting. I’ve never really thought about the fact that books are comprised of pages, which are one after another. The page has two sides, and writing is organized in a linear fashion. This description made me think about the YouTube video we watched in class about the new books versus the old scroll. I guess a new invention really does make you realize what you’ve had this whole time. I wonder what new form of media we might be trying to learn when we’re in our golden years. I also wonder if our children will get as frustrated as we’ve been trying to teach it to us.

The reading also talked about different forms of the book. One in particular was the Reading Eye Dog. It is a computer that scans text and reads it to the user. The article talked about how this change in the “material artifact” would change how the user interacts with the artifact. This would then change the meaning of the words. I found this to be a strange concept. Can the way we hear words really affect their meaning. It seems that a word will always have the same meaning, no matter how it is communicated. It made me think of an exercise from film class the other day. We watched the same series of images with different music and narration over them. The effect was to show us that the sound we hear could greatly affect the way we see the images. I suppose the same is true for text. It seems the way we are introduced to words and ideas is almost as important, if not more important, than the words themselves.

Idea Overlap

One large overlap that I found in different course material was between this class and my introduction to film class. Last week we talked about hot and cool media. We discussed how film was a hot media, since it was full of information and didn’t need much user input. My film class would definitely agree with the “full of information” part. The second one might be a tougher sell. We are constantly dissecting films and studying what actually composes different shots and scenes. While McLuhan may have meant something different than this when he talked of audience participation, we definitely participate a great deal in this class.

There is also massive overlap in ideas and terms in my other classes. My Biochemistry and Bacteriology classes are good examples. Much of the same material is covered in these classes. Bacteria is similar to many other cells in that is has an outer membrane made up of two lipid, or fat, layers. This is called a phospholipid bilayer. We use this term all the time in biochemistry also. We talk how the lipid bilayer contains proteins and other goodies that are essential for life.

Many of our classes will overlap in material, ideas, and terms. If we study these classes we can uncover this overlap. If we uncover this overlap, we may be more likely to better understand the material wherever we learn about it.

Hot and Cold Media

This week we read Marshall McLuhan’s article discussing hot and cold media. I thought this was a very interesting article. I especially liked the first couple of pages. He described how media could be either hot or cold. Hot media has high definition, while cold media has low definition. I never really thought about what high or low definition means, but I think McLuhan did a good job of defining it. He said that in a hot media, less participation is required from the audience. Just the opposite is true of cold media. The telephone is a cold media, since we have to participate a great deal to get anything out of it. Radio, on the other hand is a hot medium. He also stated how a medium may be low definition if very little information is provided. Some of this seemed to contradict itself though. He stated how the written word was a hot medium when compared to hieroglyphics but cold when compared to speech.

Another part of this article that I found very interesting was when a hot technology succeeds a cool one. He gave the example of the missionaries who gave steel axes to Australian natives. The axes used to be scarce and worked as a masculine symbol. Now, both women and children had them and when men had to borrow them, their masculinity was hindered. This tore apart their society. Besides being a good story, I liked this part because we discussed it in my cultural anthropology class last year. We discussed how even the smallest, most insignificant-seeming addition to a culture can be detrimental to it.

As the article continued, I found myself becoming more and more lost. McLuhan seemed to go on endless rants about organic myth or retribalization. Some parts also seemed counterintuitive to me. He described how backwards and unindustrialized countries could better understand and confront electric technology. This seems like a backwards statement. I’d think the countries that developed these technologies would better understand them. Even with the bit of confusion at the end of the article, I found it to be very interesting. I thought the subject of hot versus cold media is a though provoking one, which could help us better understand our own culture and community.

New Media and Academic Writing

In the past, my experiences with “academic” writing have been fairly good. I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly decent writer. These experiences have also been very formal. I try to sound like I know what I’m talking about, and present facts in a professional way. New media is completely different from this. Thanks to Facebook and instant messaging, writing in the twenty-first century has become much more similar to a casual conversation. We get used to typing to our friends and using informal language and even abbreviations. We shorten entire phrases into two or three letters.
Examples like this would be completely absurd if used in “academic” writing. I think they have started to creep into academic writing though. I constantly find myself shortening words or not capitalizing other words. I usually catch my mistakes and correct them, but just the fact that they happen in the first place shows a negative affect that new media may have on academic writing. Besides making our writing more casual, new media may also detract from important facts of our history. If we are bombarded by videos and music and Internet lingo, it must detract from what we could be learning about Shakespeare or the Gold Rush.
I do, however, find many benefits in incorporating new media into the English curriculum. First of all, if something is constantly surrounding us, it is a part of our culture, and thus, is important. I think that in order to understand anything from our past, we must first fully understand ourselves and why we are the way we are. New media also brings powerful tools to the English table. Thanks to new media we can communicate across the globe with other English enthusiasts or publish our ideas to the web for all to see.
New media being incorporated into the English curriculum truly is a touchy subject. Some may see it as a degradation of all that we’ve learned from English in the past, while others see it as the only path to our future. Either way, I believe that new media is here to stay and is a great method of learning for our generation.

What is Writing?

Networks and New Media

I thought that the article about Middlebury banning Wikipedia for student sources was rather interesting. I wasn’t really sure what the big deal was. As far as I know, all the information I’ve gotten from Wikipedia has been accurate. I was always fairly sure that it’d be a reliable source for finding information. At the same time though, I don’t think I’d ever use it for scholarly purposes. Just knowing that other people write it is scary by itself. I do think it might be a good place to start. One may be able to find a general overview of their subject, and find some good links to credible sources.
I had a bit of trouble with the reading, “What Should College English Be?” I thought there was far too much jargon, and too many big words for me to really concentrate on it. I found this rather ironic since I as the subject of the piece couldn’t even follow it. I did grasp onto the idea that our network culture is all around us and constantly affecting us. We are surrounded by the internet, Facebook, cell phones, TV, and movies everyday. Whether we like it or not, these things affect the way we perceive the world, and in turn how we’ll write about it. I found this very interesting and agree with the idea that college English should be about the network. If something has this large of an impact on us, it should be the center of study.
We also watched a short internet video for this week. It was about a teacher who wanted to expose his students to new media. He had them make videos about our new media situation and how it affects our lives. I think the main thing I got out of this piece was the fact that producing anything allows us to better understand it. If we create something, we can be fully aware of what was put into it, and what other people might get out of it. I know this to be true for me. I've made a few lame videos in the past, and they've definitely helped me better understand the creative process. The teacher wanted his students to understand new media, so he had them create new media. I think the hands-on approach is a very valuable learning resource, and a good way for anyone to learn about a subject.

I was a bit unsure what to write about in my first open blog post. I decided it’d be a good idea to write about something interesting and recent. I decided on this past weekend’s Badger hockey games. We played Minnesota State on both Friday and Saturday. The games were pretty much polar opposites. The first game I won’t go into much. We lost to those menacing Mavericks 1 to 3. Saturday night’s game was completely different though. We scored early in the first period. It made for a nice start to a game. A small fight also broke out in the first period. It wasn’t anything too serious. The refs just had to break up a couple of players. In the second period, we scored again. I’m not sure if it was this scoring, or the heat of the moment, but a huge fight broke out in the second period. It started with two players, and as soon as the refs got that fight broken up, at least two more started up. They came complete with gloves and helmets being whipped off and punches thrown. Both teams ended up with at least 5 players in their penalty box. They couldn’t even sit down in there due to the lack of room. Coming into the third period tensions were high. They were even higher when Minnesota scored their first goal, making it 2-1 Badgers. A few minutes later though, Jack Skille scored his second goal of the game, almost assuring a Badger victory with a score of 3-1. With only a couple of minutes left in the game, the Mavericks pulled their goalie in order to get some needed goals. This allowed for Jack Skille to score a third goal. In hockey, it’s called a hat trick when one player scores three goals in a single game. I’d never seen this before, but I’m glad I did. It was quite a sight. The crowd went nuts, and at least a dozen fans threw their hats onto the ice. This really was the icing on the cake that was a great game. This was easily one of the best hockey games I’ve seen in my life, and it assured that hockey is the sport for me.