contemplating digital orality

Levy, Pierre. Cyberculture. Electronic Mediations, V. 4. Minneapolis, Minn.; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001,

“Technology is responsible for neither our salvation nor our destruction. Always ambivalent, technologies project our emotions, intentions, and projects in to the material world. The instruments we have built provide us with power, but since we are collectively responsible, the decision on how to use them is in our hands“ (xv).

Cyberspace:
The new medium of communications that arose through the global interconnection of computers.

Cyberculture:
That set of technologies (material and intellectual), practices, attitudes, modes of thought, and values that developed along with the growth of cyberspace.”

While this US edition was published in 2001, this work was originally published in 1997 (in French). However, many of Levy’s theories seem to have substantial staying power in our current age. Read the rest of this entry »

“Media convergence impacts the way we consume media.” (14).

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.

Black Box Fallacy
Jenkins coined the “Black Box Fallacy” in response to the common argument that “all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go)” (14). He goes on to cite a 202 Cheskin Research report that states that whereas the prevailing thought was one convergence and everything merging into one device, the reality is that we are seeing more divergence with many devices. Jenkins even discusses his own living room entertainment that includes television, cable box, VCR, DVD player, digital recorder, sound system, game system, and a mass of video tapes. Read the rest of this entry »

“Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies” (14).

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.

OVC as a Medium
As I’ve discussed in the passed, while my research on the online video conversation (OVC) focuses on students’ use of the communication tool Viddler in the classroom, the study and the topic have little to do with Viddler. It is merely a tool that offers certain features that are beneficial to the OVC; it does not create it. Even through the course of this research, various tools and technologies are beginning to offer such features as the ability to comment within the timeline of an online video. As Henry Jenkins states, “[H]istory teaches us that old media never die–and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content…” (13). Regardless of whether Viddler persists, the phenomenon that is the OVC is not dependent on it or any other tool; it refers more to a method and a medium through which we communicate. Read the rest of this entry »

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000.

The promise of push-pull media is to marry the programming experience of television with two key yearnings: navigating information and experience, and connecting to other people. (By Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, “Push” in Wired Magazine Issue 5.03 | Mar 1997).

In Chapter 14, Bolter and Grusin discuss the concept of “Convergence,” based on a 1997 article from Wired magazine, in which the editors proclaimed the end of the Web browser in favor of the new push technology formed of the convergence of existing electronic technology. The wired editors go on to suggest that the many media of cyberspace are converging as if being pulled together in a way as powerful and unavoidable as gravity. Specifically, this convergence is comprised of the telephone, television, and Internet and offers a more full bodied experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000.

In chapter two, the authors discuss Mediation and Remediation. They note that while hypermedia and transparent media are opposites in design, they have a common goal: to move beyond representations and attain the real. However, the real is not some objective, universal truth that applies to all and that one can uncover. “The real is defined in terms of the viewer’s experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response” (53). So, transparent media tries to hide the fact that it is mediated, while hypermedia puts this fact up front and strives to offer the user a richer experience, thus invoking a fuller reality. Read the rest of this entry »