The Amazing ABC

Upon watching TV today, I realized the mass amounts of different information that existed on it. My roommates and I flipped around first stopping on a bicycle race. Watching the pack turn around the corner of the European landscape from afar truly was mesmerizing. They were going downhill on a curvy road, and must’ve been traveling forty miles an hour. Then, a guy lost control and ended up plowing into a lamppost and wall. It was pretty shocking, and came out of nowhere in an otherwise serine bike race. Next we fell upon the great cinematic classic of The Fast and the Furious. Paul Walker’s amazing acting blows me away every time. And how could anyone be more hardcore than Vin Diesel? It really is mechanical magic on screen. We then changed the station to the usual favorite of ABC Family. This station, as embarrassing as it may seem, has brought me many hours of wholesome yet hilarious entertainment. I’d have to say my favorite is Boy Meets World. I love Cory and Sean’s wacky school antics. Also, Mr. Feeny is a classic TV mentor who holds the prestige of being the voice of KITT, David Hasselhoff’s car in Knight Rider, which is pretty sweet if you ask me. Step By Step is another great ABC Family show. I think the best part of the show is that it takes place in Port Washington, Wisconsin. I also really like the amusement park with the digitally added water in the show’s intro. Then, there’s the show that happened to be on ABC Family when we switched to it today. Yes, that’s right, the modern marvel that is Gilmore Girls. Whenever I tell someone that I watch it from time to time, I start to question my sanity and wonder why I do watch it. Then I see an episode, and the constant stream of witty banter reminds me. The characters are pretty funny, and the zingers keep on coming one after another. The mom and daughter take the wit in their relationship to the max, and they aren’t bad to look at either. Yes, there truly is a vast amount of options on TV today. It’s obvious though that anything on ABC Family takes the cake.

Cooltown

For this blog post, we had to read a chapter in Jeff Rice’s book, Writing About Cool. The chapter was on the web, and I found it very interesting. The chapter started by talking about Hewlet-Packard and their vision of the future. They foresee a place called cooltown, where every part of our lives interact with the web. Even our clothes have tiny computer in them so we can interact with the web constantly. Our cars tell us what’s wrong with them and when. While this may seem like a beautiful future, it also seemed scary to me. We talked in class how if all electricity were to suddenly go away today, we’d be crippled. This would be even truer in cooltown. We’ve come to depend on technology a great deal, and I think at times it starts to degrade our intelligence. One thing to prove this that really stood out in my mind was our dependence on cell phones. I can remember when I’d have to memorize all the phone numbers that I needed. Now, they’re all stored in my cell phone. I don’t think I know any number but my own cell phone and my home phone. This point stood out to me in the part of the chapter about HP. The same thing could happen with the cars that tell us what’s wrong with them. People will start not realizing if their cars aren’t running correctly, and if the car can’t tell them, they’re in trouble. It seems like our dependence on technology could eventually lead to our downfall.

The chapter also discussed hot and cool media from McLuhan’s book Understanding Media. I thought this chapter did almost a better job of describing this idea than McLuhan did. He talked about how hot media requires little participation, while cool media requires more participation. Movies and books are hot, since we just glance over them, while the telephone is a cool media, since we must talk into it. One thing that Rice clarified for me, which I didn’t understand from reading McLuhan, is how movies are hot, while cartoons are cool. Since cartoons are less real, we must put more effort into realizing what they represent and making them real in our minds. Whether a media is hot or cool, we must be careful not to let it control our lives. Even though it’s nice for us to have technology, after a certain point, technology may be having us.

Cyborg Sensation

For today’s post we read an article by Andy Clark entitled Natural-Born Cyborgs. I thought there were some interesting ideas in the article, but mostly I just found it wordy and hard to follow. Clark seemed to constantly be describing complex ideas with even more complex words. He basically talked about how we are all cyborgs, and that our differences from other animals make us this way. One specific part of the article I liked is when he described how our brains worked. He said we’re “bad at logic and good at Frisbee”. This means our brains are bad at complex planning and logic, but good at perception and controlling actions.

We also looked at a website of a professor who creates cybernetics. He even grafted a cybernetic arm onto his own. The arm moves when he does. He also creates large moving cyborgs. I thought this site was very interesting. While some of the grafting stuff can make you a little squeamish, the idea of a man becoming part machine has always interested me. We find this idea all over in the movies and on TV. Just today, I was watching I, Robot on TV. Will Smith has a pretty hard core cybernetic arm in the movie. Also, both Anikin and Luke Skywalker have cybernetic hands in Star Wars. It’s sort of strange that there are so many instances of robotic arms in our society. I suppose it’s due to our arms being very important to our livelihoods, and us liking the idea of them being extremely powerful and strong.

Cool Music

For this Tuesday, we read a chapter in “Writing About Cool” entitled popular culture and cool. I thought it was rather interesting. The article talked a lot about popular music and what made it cool. This goes back to my constant debate about whether cool is something that is rebellious, or something that is popular. It seems obvious that the coolest music is the most popular. If many people are listening to it, many people must like it, meaning that the music must be cool. On the other hand, it seems like people are constantly trying to be cool and on the cutting edge by listening to artists that no one has ever heard of before. While this might not necessarily make the person cool, it is definitely and attempt at cool by them.

Another idea similar to this is a band becoming less cool when they’re popular. Many people seem to make the claim that “I was into this band before they were popular.” This claim puts the person liking the band when no one knew about them, and before the band was “cool.” This ironically, is an attempt to seem cool by liking something that isn’t cool. This points to the idea that rebellion is cool. Once the artist is mainstream and cool, you’re not necessarily cool for listening to them, since everyone else is too. It seems that the world of music cool is just as complicated as any other form of cool. Apparently, the only way to be a cool music connoisseur is to like unpopular artists, and the only way to be a cool artist is to be popular.

On a Hunt for Cool

For this blog post, we were supposed to conduct our own cool hunt. As I came into work this evening, I realized this and thought I was in trouble, since I hadn’t started my hunt yet. I then realized that my work environment would be the perfect locale for a cool hunt. I work in a computer lab under Camp Randall for student athletes. What better place to be immersed in cool than a place which is full of hip, trend starting, athletes. I noticed a quite a few things. Most of them like a good slouch when they sit. I suppose this gives off the feeling of comfort and relaxation. These both seem like very “cool” qualities to posses. Going along with that, many of the athletes wear sweats. While I’m sure this partly has to do with the ease of working out, I think it also goes along with the comfort and relaxation point. As in Gladwell’s article, many of the guy athletes wear the oversized leather boots. These have been around for a while, but seem to me to be in the fad category. They don’t seem too comfortable or practical. Many of the athletes also sport the backwards baseball cap with the flat brim. Rice talks about consumers using products in different ways than producers intended to make them cool. This is a perfect example. The main point of a baseball cap is to keep the sun out of your eyes. The curved brim helps with this. Turning the cap backwards makes it purely aesthetic and takes away its practical value. The flat brim only emphasizes this.

Gladwell also talked about diffusion and how “cool” spreads through culture to different people. While I wasn’t explicitly looking for this today, I saw a good example. While standing at a stoplight, waiting for the light to change, I saw a person move to the middle of the intersection, even though cars were still coming from the other direction. Sure enough, most everyone else waiting for the light to change went out into the middle of the street. While this doesn’t necessarily say anything about cool, it shows the point of diffusion, and that people are much more likely to do something if someone else does it first. This example shows that the same thing can happen in fashion or other areas of cool. If something new is seen on someone else, the trend will catch on. I’ve said it before, but group mentality is very interesting to me. It’s strange how we might do something or say something because someone else does or says it first, even though we’d normally never do it on our own. I guess it just goes to show that humans are a pack animal, and at times, we’ll go against what we think is right if everyone else is doing it too.

Viruses, Fads, and Cool

Today we read an article by Albert Barabas as well as a chapter in Writing About Cool. I thought both were rather interesting. The article started out by discussing a “cool” young man and went on to tell of his rampant homosexual exploits. He averaged around 250 partners a year. The point of interest here is that he was at the center of the AIDS epidemic in America in the early 80s. The article then went on to tell of a teen that made a cartoon about the ballots in the 2000 presidential election. He sent it out to a few of his friends and when he returned home he had thousands of hits on his website, and hundreds of emails. The article is entitled Viruses and Fads and focuses on how both can spread rapidly through our culture. This seems to be a bad almost cruel comparison. A virus is obviously a horrible thing that no one looks forward to. A fad on the other hand, only propagates because people like or enjoy the object of the fad. It turns out that the two do have some things in common; mainly the fact that they can spread very rapidly before anyone really even realizes it. I liked this article because it told a bunch of different little stories and shifted focus fairly often. It was a nice change of pace, and it was easy to stay focused on the reading. I liked the story about the hybrid farm. I found it almost unbelievable that between 1933 and 1939 the number of acres of farmland with hybrid corn rose from 40,000 to 24,000,000. This is a dramatic increase, and it yet another example of how quickly a fad can spread.

The article from Writing About Cool was also interesting. It talked about advertising and mainly focused on how advertisers use the idea of rebellion to make a product “cool”. If a product is seen as different and rebellious, people will want to buy it. This is an idea furthered in part by people like Elvis and James Dean. This whole idea of cool rebellion seems to go in a circle. Something is new and different. People buy it because it is seen as a form of rebellion. As more and more people buy it however, it becomes more popular and is almost an antithesis to the original rebellion it started as. An example I thought of was the RAZR. At first, these phones were the bee’s knees. Soon, it seemed like everyone had a RAZR. When you see someone with one today, it’s not a huge deal. Instead, newer, more rebellious phones take its place in the position of cool. I find it very interesting to think of the concept of cool. I like watching the group mentality of people and how all are affected by the actions of one. What does cool really mean, and why do most of us strive for it?