In the words of the 733t, "WTF?"

Okay... does anybody who is in my class know how to get rid of the damn spammers on the comments section? I want to have a comments section, because I like having a place for people to leave feedback. What I don't like is writing about the news media and then being told how cool my blog is and how I should check out a blog for HUMMINGBIRD FEEDERS. I love the concept of a machine parsing my text and seeing that I compare McLuhan's writing style to a hummingbird, and then making the logical operation that I must be a bird enthusiast.

IF "Dieses ist mein Handel" prints "hummingbird"
THEN "Dieses ist mein Handel" = Audubon member
ELSE select another arbitrary buzzword
AND faith_in_humanity = faith_in_humanity - 1

Can anyone help?

On a Wing and a Fare

I was just thinking about the emergency landing of the Jet Blue flight on Wednesday. From a media studies perspective, I'm really interested in the fact that the passengers were able to watch the televised newscasts of what was happening (via streaming satellite). Apparently the onboard screens were shut off ~15min before landing, but they were still able to watch live footage of themselves circling for hours while experts were hypothesizing as to what their fate would be. I was thinking back to the concept of immediacy. Live television, for good or bad, has become a staple of modern televised news. Live TV gives us perhaps a greater sense of immediacy, as we see what is unraveling as the event itself takes place. Spectators at the landing - when the freeway was shut down and everyone watched - could be said to have an even greater sense of immediacy, as there is no mediation imposed on them by broadcasted news. The passengers are in the most immediate of all states, though, in that they are simultaneously the spectator and the spectacle.

Just thought that was an interesting set of circumstances.

Booin' at McLuhan

I dreaded this reading from day one when I saw it on the schedule. Well... perhaps "dread" is the wrong word. I guess I was just not looking forward to it. It comes down to this:

Ol' Marshall annoys the hell out of me.

He annoyed me back in Intro, and (lo and behold) he annoys me now. His writing flows like a hummingbird. Just when he gets to something that sounds interesting, BAM! He's off to another subject. It's a pity the man is dead, because it means that I can't take him out myself. Anyway...

His deal of hot and cold media made some sense, but he was so insistent upon cramming everything into these two diametric labels that I was just left thinking "so what?" I felt he really tried to pidgeon hole media with this concept, but I feel that it's deceiving to act as if any of these media forms are single-sided as far as their "hot" and "cold"-ness. TV, he says, is an example of cold media (meaning it's interactive... right?)... but how is it interactive to sit there and watch a program? I guess you can change the channel... but you're still not really interacting with it all that much. So why did he have to insist upon these labels? No need, Marshall, no need.

That's pretty much it... So much for "Understanding Media."

Love and Death, or Shaking the Speare of Shakespeare

I'm writing this as a sort of response to amers' post entitled "Death and Text: Some Shakespeare." I agree with most of what amers has said here, but the comment "Love is not permanent" caused me to raise my eyebrows. I have some issues with that, perhaps because it's a rather broad statement. Love is not permanent to whom? If it is a love that two people share with eachother, and they carry it with them to their deaths (which indeed is inevitable and should be expected), could it not be said that that love was permanent for them? If viewed from a third party, one could say "well, they're both dead, and with it dies their love." But what about love on a universal (or at least global) level? There are 6 billion plus people on the planet as of late, so there's definitely a substantial amount of love in there.

Then I suppose there's the somewhat angsty teen way of looking at it in that all love is destined to fade to black... or perhaps a depressingly gloomy shade of gray.

Regardless of my thoughts on the subject, I want to close this post with one of my favorite quotes. It's from the film "Hedwig and The Angry Inch."

[a very obnoxious woman is singing "I Will Always Love You" in one of the trailers in the park]
Tommy: What do you think? Do you think love lasts forever?
Hedwig: No, but this song does.

Tertiary Orality??

Okay... it's been a bit of a while since I've posted, but I posted at the beginning of last week, and this is the end of this week... so yeah. Also, I wanted to spend a bit of time rolling the concepts of primary/secondary orality vs. literacy around in my head. Let me take a crack at what I've got thus far:

Video games. Damn, man. I've been playing video games since before I can remember. Hell, I might have been born with a Nindendo controller in my hand. Point is, in my ~15 years of video game experience there has been a HUGE change in technology. Example: I just installed both "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Call of Duty" on my computer. Both are WW2 first-person shooter games. The former was made in 1992, the latter in 2003 (I think). The differences are astounding. "Wolfenstein 3D" was groundbreaking in its time. It was among the very first 3D games. It also featured actual digitized voices for the enemy characters. The plot was simple: you're a POW who has to blast his way out of a Nazi castle. "Call of Duty" on the other hand has graphics that leave Wolfenstein in the dust. All characters audibly speak dialog (not just random shouts in German); there is an orchestral score; you take the role of US, UK and USSR soldiers in recreations of battles like Normandy and Stalingrad. I know this isn't all that unique when you look at the whole gamut of games out there today, but the point is that in the span of 10 years, games have come incredibly far.

Now I'll bet you're wondering what this has to do with the concepts of orality and literacy. Well let's get down to it.

The graphics are amazing... wow... but forget about that. The thing I want to look at is character dialogue. I grew up playing games where all storylines were conveyed through text. Little blue boxes with white words would pop up on the screen and tell you who was planning on destroying the world. Basically, the plot progression of any "in depth" or explansive video game (e. g. not typical arcade games) relied on the concept of literacy. That's the way it was from its inception, and it's still quite prevalent today. Fairly recently, though, it has become commonplace for there to be vocal dialogue in games. Entire storylines are conveyed through speech. Now, do you think it's possible to look at this as some sort of... tertiary orality? Okay, video games originally spawned from the literary culture which has become an intrinsic part of our culture. Now this literacy has been transformed into a sort of orality in these video games. The one difference I see is that we were talking (or Ong was talking) about how the advent of literature isn't really even considered a technology anymore since it is so commonplace. Seeing this tertiary orality as a technology is unavoidable in avid gamers, however. Is this because society is moving so fast that a technology jump of this sort takes place over a very short period of time? My thoughts on this are getting progressively abstract, so I feel like it would be best to stop here before I confuse myself. Anyone have any ideas about this, though?

A comic

Just thought of this comic after class today. It's entitled "Game System" and comes from the Perry Bible Fellowship. It's a great comic series that comes out (approximately) every Sunday. The website is www.thepbf.com.

Random Thought Deposit

If my thoughts were like grains of rice (or some other non-perishable good), this particular entry is akin to a burlap bag into which I can place said grains so as to make room for others.

Did that make any sense? Man, I hope so cuz that took a while to think up there.

Okay. I thought this was somewhat amusing. This is an ad from microsoft. I don't know if you can read it, but it is for "the new msn Search." It says "Have questions, get answers with Instant Answers." Okay... who was the brain-box behind the Instant Answers campaign? Now you can get answers with answers, but these answers are of the instant sophistication. Wait, it gets better. The sample query is "Where is champagne?" A reasonable question, as many people know of the beverage, but not the geographic location that this particular libation hails from. Thanks to the magic of Microsoft's new Instant Answers we get solid results: "Champagne (wine) sparkling wine produced by a traditional method in the Champagne region around..." Now, perhaps I am just not quite as clever as those hepcats from MS, but all this search has managed to tell us is that champagne is located in the Champagne region. Magnificent. I am so glad to see that Microsoft is continuing its tradition of excellence.

Next thought: College is weird this year. I have a roommate... I mean, he's a close friend of mine, but still. I got a single freshman year and I was a sponsor last year, so this is a relatively new experience for me. I'm also going to be working a lot harder. Last semester was my hardest so far (including my brief stint in the science world), and yet I managed to get really decent marks. I need to start figuring out my life. Damn... I mean, where am I living next summer? How am I going to get a job? What are my goals after college? I have to start thinking about all this junk now and it's creepin' me out. I kinda just want to be a kid again.

That's a funny thought: being a kid again. I've been feeling recently that I am sort of growing out of college. I mean, I love it here. I love going to school, hanging out with friends, etc. but the thing that gets me is the college social life. I mean, talk about banal. Every weekend it's the o so common "what are we going to do tonight?" and the answer is always something to do with sleazy college parties and alcohol. Surprise! I'm bored of that. I want a real life where I do real things. I sowed my oats freshman year, and now I'm actually proud of the fact that I can remember what I did on a given night. It's ridiculous. This weekend, for instance: dry week ended for almost all (all?) of the colleges except for Pomona. So what happened? College kids swarmed like flies around a dead animal. What the hell? It looked like someone had detonated a small thermonuclear device at CMC. I wanted to drag some cops up there just so they could bust people on littering alone. Wow, such egregious disrespect for... everything.

Blah.

Okay, I need to wake up early for class, so I should make the 2ft trek to my bed. Goodnighter.

Thoughts deposited.

I'm an Intruder

"Intruder" was really kinda depressing. A lot of emotions went through my head as I "played" it. Actually, the first time I explored it was at ITS. I went there with a friend to print out some articles (including "Remediation). While I was waiting for her to get all of her stuff squared away, I just fired it up. There is no audio on the computers there - which in reflection is a really smart idea in a communal technology center - and because of this my reaction to it was disturbingly different from what it would be the second time around.

As I played, I was bombarded with phrases on the screen. Due to the resolution of the flash program and the speed at which the text was traveling, I found it quite difficult to read and eventually I had pretty much given up hope of catching more than about 10% of it. I was somewhat entertained by the games, even though I couldn't really figure out the point/rules of some (and the vagina dropping strange objects out of it was quite confusing for me, too). I made it to the football one when my friend was ready to go.

So I came back to it this evening on my computer with my speakers and my reaction was... quite different. I'll be totally honest and say that I am a big gamer, and because of this I naturally gravitated towards the visual/gaming aspect of the experience. As I continued to play though, I started picking up bits and pieces of the story being told ("killed a man," "whore house") and I began feeling quite uncomfortable. I felt like I was a child playing a video game and feeling very uncomfortable while two adults (parents?) were arguing nearby. I felt like I was listening in on something that was not meant for me to hear (I was, for all intents and purposes, and intruder), and because of this I tried to pull myself further into the game, using the stimulus of it to drown out whatever else was going on.

Then I started realizing that, for some games, the story wouldn't continue until you messed up (the football one and the girl jumping over the hole, for instance). I was trying to do well in these games so that I would be spared from listening to it.

The games themselves were very simple, and reminded me of playing the atari on Saturday mornings. For me, that's a really innocent and comforting memory. The final game really bothered me, though. I thought of footage I had seen of US helicopter pilots gunning down several people (the video can be found here... it's rather disturbing, so heads up). This particular game drew a connection between my happy atari memory and the helicopter footage, and that made me uneasy.

Now! How this relates to the "Remediation" article in my head: I think that "Intruder" is an example of something that's hypermediated. I was hit with a deluge of stimuli. So much so that it seems impossible for me to absorb all of it. This is remedied slightly in this case by the fact that I could watch "Intruder" several times in order to take in as much as I could. In much of hypermediated mainstream media, the viewer is constantly being smacked in the face by information. "Remediation" was obviously written a few years ago... yes, I just leaned over and checked... so it was obviously written 5 years ago. The big tipoff for me was the screenshot of CNN. It was being used as an example of a source of information that has been hypermediated, and yet it looks almost spartan when compared to today's MSNBC CBS ABC AOL... I grow tired of typing these names... I just found it quite entertaining to see how far we've progressed as a culture as far as 24-hour news is concerned.


On another note, Blogger's coding for posting messages is really getting on my nerves. It tried to turn all my text into a hyperlink. I also like courier because it makes me feel like a writer of some sort. If it's too much of an eyesore drop me a line and I change it up.