Professional Portfolio

Please “comment” on this post with the following information regarding your final project, the professional portfolio:

1. URL address
2. Who is your target audience for this portfolio? List 3-5 of the most important characteristics you were attempting to demonstrate to the audience.
3. Provide a short rationale for what you decided to include (this could also cover what you chose not to include and why).
4. How did you frame (set up, arrange, organize) the work? Why?
5. What would you have liked to have that you didn’t.
6. How well do you think this body of work represents your professional abilities?

Mapping Projects

Sorry for the late post. Please “Comment” on this entry by posting a link to your mapping project. If it’s a group project, please let me know all participants. If you’d like (or wouldn’t mind) your reflection to be public, you can post it here. If you’d like it private, please email me the reflection separately. Thanks.

Simulation

Our last key concept for the semester is simulation, a topic popularized by theory Jean Baudrillard but picked up by many people in media and communication studies. Here are a few of his key definitions and categorizations covered in our text for today.

“Simulacra and Simulation” breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

1. faithful image/copy: a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality”
2. perversion of reality: the sign an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality as an “evil appearance,” obscuring reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. masks the absence of a profound reality: the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original.
4. pure simulation: the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever.

Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period (from Hegarty, Paul (2004). Jean Baudrillard: live theory. London: Continuum):

1. Renaissance (premodern): representation is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item.
2. Industrial revolution (modern): distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass reproducible copies, turning them into commodities that threatens the authority of the original.
3. Late Capitalism (postmodern): simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes meaningless.

Our activity for class today is that each table group should find one example of simulation that wasn’t outlined explicitly in our text and explain how it functions in relationship to the terms above but even more importantly, how it functions rhetorically. “Comment” on this message with your group’s example and provide at least one external link to the concept or source.

Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Fair Use

Here are links to several sites we’ll use in class:

• Copyright Timeline (text)
• Copyright: Forever Less One Day (video)
• What Can Be Copyrighted? (web text)
• Length of Copyright (.pdf chart)
• Organization for Transformative Works (web resources)
• Statement Opposing Copyright Extension (legal text)
• Everything is a Remix (video)
• Steal Like an Artist (video: TedTalk)
• Four Factor Test for Fair Use (text)
• Fair(y) Use Tale (video)
• Bound by Law (graphic text .pdf)
• Four Chord Song (video)
• Brand Color (infographic)
• Playing with Plagiarism: Remixing what Sticks (academic webtext with remix video)
• Creative Commons (extensive web resources)

Activity: In groups of 2-4, find examples of online texts that push intellectual property boundaries. “Comment” on this post with a link to the example and a short description of the problem. What concepts from our readings or discussion would help guide your thinking about the copyright issues involved here?

Evocative Objects and Interface

This week’s readings included several sections from Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects: Things We Think With that suggests that objects connect us to physical and emotional worlds. In her introduction, Turkle cites Claude Levi-Stauss, who describes bricolage as recombining a closed set of materials to come up with new ideas. The mini-chapters, then, in the text demonstrate this connection between people, objects, and identities: the cello, the physical and digital archive, the stars and the spaces between them, keyboards (music and typing), the yellow raincoat, and Murray the stuffed bunny.

We’ll take a few minutes to connect this back to interface today, but your in class assignment is to “comment” with a reflection of an object (preferably one related, even tangentially) to composing that  connects that bring together thought or feeling, that catalyze self-creation, that are boundary objects, that shape and are shaped by who we are.

Interactivity and Participatory Culture

While Interactivity and Participatory Culture are now the same thing, they are related. In fact, Terry Flew in our reading today writes that “the combination of media convergence–the distribution and accessing of media content across multiple platforms–and more interactive social media are dramatically reducing barriers to media participation, thereby radically transforming media production, distribution and reception” (75).

He goes on to set up of the major differences between what he calls 20th century mass communication and 21st century convergent social media, which he can see in his chart to the right.

After his section on transmedia storytelling, which we can talk more about in class if there is interest, he launches into a section on the Pro-Am divide, saying that social media and especially Web 2.0 platforms have three interrelated tendencies.

1. flattened hierarchies between content producers and consumers,
2. new opportunities for participation (and kinds of interactivity), and
3. network amplification.

For him this sets up his argument about the perceived binary between old and new media cultures, which is an interesting topic, but not the focus of where I hope to take this today in class. Instead of that argument, I want us to look at the claims for interactivity set up in Gane and Beer’s chapter. They present several problems with the digital ideal (they call it a cyperbole) for interactivity. So they cite Manovich, McLuhan, and others who would claim that traditional cinema or going to an art exhibit is just as (if not more) interactive than some of the digital technologies that claim to be interactive.

• What is the basis for this claim? How convinced are you by the argument?

Importantly, though, Gane and Beer shift to a more humanist approach to interactivity through Spiro Kiousis, who brings human agency to the analysis and discusses people’s sense of interactivity and the anthropomorphization of new media technologies that mirror human interaction.

As an example, they bring in interactive museum spaces, suggesting, “Interactivity is not simply a technical interaction between device and a user in a museum space, but rather a process through which ‘public memories,’ knowledge, and culture are mediated more generally” (97).

I want to explore these ideas a bit more by asking you to spend some time navigating an online museum space, several of which can be found by clicking here.

Using the “comment” feature, describe the types of interactivity that spaces such as these provide.

• What are the features of the interaction?
• What degree of agency do you have?
• What is most and least satisfying about the experience?

Networks: Small Worlds and Weak Ties

We’re going to spend most of our time in class today talking about Gane and Beer’s “Network” chapter, but I don’t want to ignore the contributions of Flew, especially the common properties of networks (59-60).

• small worlds: small groups densely connected and clustered while large groups are more sparse
• weak ties: through weak ties, different forms of information become available and are more likely to be a source of novel information
• hubs and connectors: key nodes through which a large amount of traffic is distributed
• power laws of distribution: 20% of agents will account for 80% of traffic

The image above is what a LinkedIn network might look like (found at http://www.dashe.com/blog/informal-learning/power-weak-ties/).

Here’s another short piece about the power of the weak tie:

http://copernicusconsulting.net/what-makes-a-weak-tie/

In Class Discussion Questions:

1. What characteristics does the network pictured above demonstrate?
2. Where is the “power” in this network according to our different network theorists?

In Class Activity

In a “Comment” to this post, find another visual representation of network, and provide a brief analysis of what you see. Feel free to draw on any of the language or frameworks that our chapters provided for today.

• What can this type of network analysis show us?
• What questions might it raise? hat conclusions–if any–can you draw from it?

Why Concepts?

In our reading for today, Nicholas Gane and David Beer ask and begin to answer the question of why they organize their book around 6 key concepts in media studies (pp. 2-6). The short version of their response to the utilities of concepts is this:

1. The first involves the manufacturing… universal concepts: encyclopedic definitions that seek to give concepts a fixed, universal meaning (pp. 3-4).
2.  Second, concepts can be produced in service of the capitalistic market: marketable concepts, geared to the production of ideas that are valued for their economic worth (pp. 4-5).
3. A third possible line, labelled pedagogy of the concept, is experimental in nature and uses concepts in a flexible, open-ended way to address problems as and when they arise (pp. 5-6).

Clearly, in this framework we’d want to be on the side of the angels and associate most with the last option. In another part of my reading and research, I’m looking at a different set of definitions and reasons for defining concepts, in this case disciplinary “threshold concepts.” Characteristics of threshold concepts can be found at the following site: http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds.html.

The purpose of Threshold Concepts is to articulate what we claim to know in a particular discipline but also to help explain what we know to others outside the field, which is one of the purposes of this course. Another way to understand Threshold Concepts is that they are things and ways to knowing that provide access to expertise. According to their originators,

“Threshold Concepts may be considered to be akin to passing through a portal or conceptual gateway that opens up previously inaccessible way[s] of thinking about something” (Meyer and Land).

So if we thought about the concepts in the book (and the slightly different list I have for the class) more along the lines of Threshold Concepts, their utility might be something along these lines:

• as boundary objects for defining and explaining what we know,
• as heuristics or portals for planning, or
• as a set of propositions that can be put into dialogue with [others] for a richly layered map.

What are some potential threshold concepts that you’ve learned as an EWM student that have shaped your understanding of writers, texts, or technologies? What difference might these learned understandings have for you? What about that might you be able to demonstrate to an external audience?

Bolter and Grusin “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation”

As part of our introduction today, we’re looking (back) at the first chapter in Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media. I want us to consider several questions:

• What are your working definitions of immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation?
• What are some characteristics and examples of each?
• According to the introduction (which we didn’t read for today), the double logic of remediation is that or culture wants “both to multiple its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (5). Today’s reading of chapter one provides some examples of this double logic. How would you describe and explain this paradox?
• What does all this say about “new media,” especially since they argue that “remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media” (45)?

I would argue that the following scholarly webtexts embody many of the principles from Bolter and Grusin:

• “Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement” by Susan Delagrange
• “Making Meaning at the Intersections: Developing a Digital Archive for Multimedia Research” by Michael Neal, Katherine Bridgman, and Stephen McElroy

How might you discuss the frameworks in Bolter and Grusin in relationship to these two webtexts?

Definitions, Theories, and Frameworks for New Media

Using Chapter 1 in Terry Flew’s New Media 4th ed., sources you’ve read in other EWM classes, and online searches, identify as may definitions, theories, and frameworks for “new media” as you can find. Provide author’s names, sources, and dates for as many as you can, and provide a short description or definition. At this point, you don’t need to evaluate or put them in dialogue with one another. We just want a comprehensive list of definitions, theories, and frameworks to start the semester.

The following is one example that provides a working definition and a nice, but quick, overview of several terms associated with new media literacy.