Meta Is Better...
Ah, a Meta Blog. A blog post about the blog in which it exists. No content, about itself, breaking the ninth wall.
So lets get started.
Content: The content of my blog has been casual reflections on my Networked Media Production unit. It reflects on how excited I was by HTML and I stopped writing about it after our first assessment. I wonder why that could have been? Oh well, that’ll teach me to use dreamweaver. I’ve tried to make things interesting but I have generally failed. Which is fine by me because... well, I’ll get to that.
Audience: If the blogsphere is the world’s atmosphere then this little group of bloggers for this unit is a microclimate. Our audience is each other, if we have an audience at all. I know of only two non-unit-administrator-types who have ever read my blog; they are CFAR and ZombieStomper. And ZombieStomper actually sits next to me in class so she hardly counts. But that’s okay. A blog is something we don’t necessarily need an audience for. It’s purpose for me was to journal things in a way that had the potential to be read by anyone, but the chances of being read by next to no one. I didn’t expect anything else.
Connectivity: Now this is interesting. My blog was instantly connected to a few other blogs via the blogroll. (Which I titled “Fellow Inmates”) But beyond that I didn’t so much go out of my way to get connected to the Internet, rather I used it as a tool. I like to think that early on with my blog I used Hypertext to its fullest extent. I found that making normal words hyper could add a whole new layer of context and could make sentences funnier, deeper or a take them to another extreme of boring. I’ve tried hard to promote some of my favorite new-media work. I have frequently linked to the TV Tropes site, and also made reference to Hungry Beast and TGTW.
But Liquor Is Quicker!
Now to get some real reflecting done. This Unit started out as a very exciting eye opening experience and degenerated quickly into a chore and the feeling that my time was being wasted. While the lectures usually always have some excellent content that gives my imagination a nice friendly kick, the tutes have been consistently boring and more often than not they’ve been very unhelpful. I can’t bring myself to blame anyone but it certainly felt like this entire unit could have been done through moodle (which would make it an excellent correspondence course) The worst part is that it’s essential to my degree; which is almost as bad as needing to do a major in professional midwifery. The main thing about this unit that turned it into a chore was this stupid blog. When you don’t want to write something it’s hard to get yourself to write something. That’s not to say it’s hard to write a blog, but it is very hard to write a blog on demand. Without pay. (I recon if I was being paid to blog I could do it easy).
So I’ve got that out of my system. Here are my three “best” blog posts in blogological order:
Number 1:
Gleeful Brooding and the Positive Effects of Depressing Thoughts...
I've just gotten home from work. Well not just, I had a smoke with Tom from up stairs and I watched some Chester A Bum and now I'm typing. I wanted this blog to be funny all the time and slightly offensive all the time but I think that’s impossible because I myself am not funny and offensive all the time. At the moment I'm a bit melancholy. Long night at work doing shit for shit pay to come home and feel down will do that to you.
So I was rolling a cigarette, as I do. And I got that feeling I know many people get. Its when you're just depressed, your brain has run out of happy juice and if you can't put some of your own happy juice into it (using a drug of some sort or chocolate or a loved one) then its going to go back to its natural state of shitfest. And you'll be stuck with the best thoughts you'll ever get in your life.
But the actual thoughts when this wave firsts hits you is difficult to at first recognize and then also to describe. But I think I’ve cracked it. You lose context. Context of yourself. I was sitting there rolling my smoke and that's all I was. Some bastard who smelt like a Hungry Jack's bin rolling a smoke in an apartment he can't afford to live in at one o'clock in the morning. I felt like I had no past, no future and my present was just pathetic and pointless. But at the same time my straw Vulcan logic told me that it was a chemical thing and that I should do something about it because such thoughts can actually be dangerous. So I thought I’d write, which is the first best cure for such things because in a rush of self worth you put yourself back in context.
So this post is partly therapeutic.
But now I have some insight into media production, and it comes courtesy of Spike Milligan via my English teacher Mr. Unwin. Mr. Unwin once told me about a story Mr. Milligan had written, it was about this youth. Say he's nineteen. And he's walking up a street, and he stops. There's an old guy sitting there who asks him why he's stopped. The kid says "because I can't forward, I mean as the street gets further away both sides just get closer and closer and eventually they'll get to close together and I’ll be able to go no further."
Old guy says, "Don't be so bloody stupid," because kids are bloody stupid, "That's just perspective, you'll find as you keep going forward the streets will stay parallel, it because things that a further away seem smaller and so the gap between the sides of the street seems smaller."
The kid says all right and keeps walking. Eventually of course the sides of the street have in fact closed in and he can go no further. Angry and embittered he turns around and walks all the way back. The old man isn't there because he's died in the meantime.
I get that story now.
It’s all superficial. Everything. What's there is what is. Our ancestors would have us believe otherwise but its all bullshit. They believed in stupid things that were obviously wrong and obvious things that were stupidly wrong. The only truth is what we can see and hear and feel and all else is rubbish. If a woman looks beautiful, she is beautiful. Our bodies are all we are. No soul, no magic dust or whatever people think. Our brain sustains all our thoughts and memories and if you don't believe it your mind can be changed thought chemical and surgical stimulus. When your brain stops working you are gone. You go to the same place fire does when it is put out.
This is beautiful and perfect and makes sense. So be nice to your bodies, it’s all you've got and take this lesson away with you. What we see is so much more powerful then what we're told. What we're told can contradict what we see and we'll often believe it, but we ultimately shouldn't. In that same thread if you watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, keep searching until you can pull a rabbit out of a hat. Find out how it’s done. Kill the magic because magic is lies. If you have a website showing the magic trick, you're ripping people off unless you have a "how to" section that explains the trick away.
Which brings me to my very long-winded point. New Media is a combination of media available to anyone with an Internet connection. The most powerful medium is video, then a toss up between still pictures and audio and then text. A good website will have all three but showcase the Video. The video should be the heart of the website wherever possible. That will draw the surfers in and then if it’s good enough excite them to look at other stuff on the site. They will become interested enough to look at the pictures and listen to the audio, all the while the text will have been guiding them but only after exhausting the multi media will the likely settle on the written articles. That could be wrong, mind you, people could watch video and then go straight to articles (or comments and discussion of the video, that seems very likely) anyway that is how Spike Milligan and Mr. Unwin helped me understand some media stuff
Number 2:
The lecture today was like of you put if you put Denny Crane in a box freezer for a few years. Kind of hard but totally awesome. To give you some idea of how my brain was when it started I shall use some of my screenwriting skills.
HTML
Hey!! OMG I haven't seen you in ages!
DAVESAKE
Oh, hi HTML, how's it going?
HTML
I'm just having the totally best time of my life! Being the foundation of the World Wide Web is like one long acid trip!
DAVESAKE
Oh yeah sound great.
HTML
So you wanna get blind stinking drunk and spew all over That Guy With The Glasses?
DAVESAKE
Oh gee, hey HTML that sounds great except I'm totally swamped at the moment...
HTML
Swamped with what?
DAVESAKE
I... I... I... Oh! I have to clean my room. Big mess. Bad. Gotta clean it.
HTML
Whatever dude, my port is always open if you wanna ejaculate some of those creative juices.
DAVESAKE
Yeah okay see ya....
DAVESAKE(cont.)
(Mumbling under breath)
Loser.
So I was basically not at all interested and a little intimidated by the thought of HTML. And then Mike got the little black screen happening with all the little tags and words and codes and stuff and he opened it with safari and it was a webpage and then he changed the little codes and shit and then refreshed the safari page and it changed and I was totally like I could totally like do that it would be soeasyandonceigotthebasicsthepossibilitiesareliketotallyendlessandtheniwasliketotally SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!
Wooh.
Calm. Calm. Calm calm calm Calmcalmcalmcalmcalm!!!!!!! SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!
Okay. I'm good.
So yeah I am very impressed with the possibilities presented by learning HTML and I’m actually even starting to waver in my chosen career path... Curse you interesting lectures, you damn me again!!!!
There's a HTML section in blogger and I’m keen to give it a try. So my next post (unless something happens) will be done in HTML on blogger.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was my previous post in which I used spike Milligan’s story to explain that the superficial is all there is.
Well.
Don't I look clever now. WebPages are basically a middle finger to that line of thought (it still applies to real world stuff though) and my poor and faithful friend wysiwig died today halfway through the lecture at the cruel hands of Mr. Honey (my new favorite bond villain).
Well thanks for reading Nobody, you've been good company. I look forward to our next session together, and I think I’ll invite HTML over for a party, he sounds pretty keen.
Number 3:
Michael has spoken about a trade off that comes from this mass connectivity that exists in the world. The price of Metcalfe's law, so to speak. As an example he spoke about cutting out the middlemen, disintermediation. The newspapers lose money because they no longer are the place to go to sell your junk. We've got eBay now for that. But then the newspapers can't afford to employ journalists and we're deprived of quality journalism.
I very strongly disagree with this line of thought, and believe that the tradeoff occurs far away from the pros and cons of the death of old Media. For one this, Old Media is losing for a reason. There is next to nothing New Media can't do that Old Media can. Quality journalism comes from quality journalists, not from newspapers. If the newspapers won't employ them then the Internet will be their new best friend. Blogs, as has been pointed out in lectures, can be seen as journalism. Sell advertising space on your blog and if you're good enough you're getting paid again. If Twitter wants to make money, they should have people pay to subscribe to quality journalist news feeds, after all it’s not only about reporting the truth but reporting it the fastest. What we lose in the newspapers, the Internet gives back in abundance. And saves trees.
So where do I think the tradeoff happens? Well after today's (wait, time check... yesterday's) lecture I had a thought... Global citizens are fucking stupid.
This Networked Media Class might be able to guess Michael's weight using the power of averages, but big fucking deal. Crowds aren't wise. There is some lovely maths that means educated guesses are excellent things to group and draw graphs from and can help in lots of lovely ways. Key Word here; EDUCATED! In terms of chance, it doesn't work that way. That magician who claims to have used a group of people to predict the lottery numbers (he was on sunrise, so was the guy who proved he was a fraud. It was a simple technological trick using some camera magic, not crowd psychicness) So people in large groups are not smart, unless they are all educated a little on the subject at hand.
So here it is. The Tradeoff. Collective Intelligence gives us YouTube, wikipedia and other wonderful things that I adore and wish I could go back in time and invent.
And it gives us people who will buy tulips for ridiculous amounts of money. It gives us the collective intelligence mob mentality that will drive the price of stock to ridiculous lows just because one person has lots of shares. It robs us of real world material in many ways. The GFC GEC Sub prime mortgage whatever left a lot of people in a very bad situation. That poor Dutch schmuck who sold all his land for a fucking flower is another example. It makes the value of things wrong. Good and services should be simple, supply and demand should be simple. i.e. Just because something is rare doesn't mean it should be valuable. Just because something is rare and useful, doesn't mean it should be valuable. Bu when something is rare, useful, and everybody wants one, it should be valuable.
Collective intelligence warps value to the point of idiocy. And gives such a pool of human thought that there is nothing we can't achieve.
It’s almost paradoxical, but I think it’s a fair tradeoff.
No comments:
Post a Comment