Blog. Think. Do. Study.

Most importantly, learn.

Adaobi

P.S. I seriously enjoyed this class and gained so much insight from it. Thanks colleagues for the riveting class discussions, thanks Dr. C for coaxing the medianuts out of us, and thanks Mrs. Filgo for being our efferverscent, omnipresent virtual (and physical) librarian! Hope you all have safe, fun, and restful Christmas breaks!

A major theme in fashion is identity; Quentin Crisp said it best when he said that “fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” Fashion is the medium of identity, much in the same fashion (pun intended) as avatars in Lucasfilm’s Habitat. Chip Morningstar and and F. Randall Farmer state plainly how things are to work in their virtual world: “The idea behind our world was precisely that it did not come with a fixed set of objectives for its inhabitants, but rather provided a broad palette of possible activities from which the players could choose, driven by their own internal inclinations”. Fashion doesn’t really have a true objective, but is controlled by the consumer, driven by what the ‘user’ considers fitting. Avatars in habitat, many times, will demonstrate an extension of one’s personality rather than a duplicate representation, a lot like fashion does in the real world.

Now the appropriate question to ask would be, “What’s new media, in terms of fashion?” To understand the new media, we must first understand the old media. The ‘old’ media of fashion mostly consists of magazines and other print media. The most influential fashion magazines are Vogue, Elle, and Marie Claire, in that order. Vogue was first established in 1892 in the United States and has been published monthly ever since; on the other hand, Elle and Marie Claire were both first established in France in 1945 and 1937 (respectively). Other forms of ‘old’ media in fashion include newspapers that include Style sections such the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News. The new media in fashion has been brought about by the Internet revolution. The milestones of fashion new media are the websites of designers, e-commerce, and blogs. Websites are innovatory to the fashion industry because prior to the Internet, the only ways designers could have shown their designs were through runway shows that only the elite could attend, and ad campaigns, which run in fashion publications (and occasionally on billboards). With websites, designers can display advertising campaigns without having to pay the cost to magazines for space. Through websites comes another innovation of fashion new media: e-commerce. E-commerce is the process of buying merchandise electronically and having it mailed, rather than having to go a boutique or a department store. E-commerce is yet another way to make high fashion available to the everyday man. Lastly, blogs, the new medium of fashion I have decided to focus on, have allowed for a change in fashion. Not only have blogs also made fashion more accessible to the everyday man, but they have also turned the tables in fashion because they allow designers to get feedback, fashion outsiders to give commentary, and in general, blogs have allowed for more discussion in the fashion community. A fashion blog is just a blog that deals with fashion and merchandising. Fashion blogs are most easily characterized by the focus of the content: model/celebrity, shopping/merchandising, commentary, street fashion, lifestyle, and publication extension.

Even though blogs have seemed to make overnight changes in fashion, blogs took a long time to come to be as they are. Here is a timeline of the progression of the blog form: 1969: The Internet is invented. • 1989: Tim Berners-Lee proposes the development of the World Wide Web as a way to share information with colleagues. • 1992: Tim Berners-Lee launches the first Web site • 1994: Claudio Pinhanez of MIT publishes his “Open Diary” at the same time as online diarist Justin Hall • 1995: FrontPage, one of the first Web publishing tools, is released • 1997: Jorn Barger starts a log of Web links published in reverse chronological order, calling it Robot Wisdom WebLog. • 1998: Open Diary becomes one of the first online tools to assist users in the publishing of online journals • 1999: Peter Merholz borrows Barger’s word “weblog” and splits it into the phrase “We blog.” Blog soon becomes shorthand for weblog. • 2002: The launch of Technorati, one of the first blog search engines, making it possible for people to track blog conversations on a continuous basis. • 2004: Videographer Steve Garfield launches his video blog and declares 2004 “The Year of the Video Blog,” more than a year before the birth of YouTube. • February 2004: Flickr launches • 2005: Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center launch Global Voices • March 2005: Garrett M. Graff becomes the first blogger to receive credentials for the daily White House briefing. • 2006: Twitter launches • 2006: Research report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates that 12 million U.S. adults publish their own blogs. • 2007: Technorati reports it is tracking more than 112 million blogs worldwide.

Blogging has had such a huge impact on modern fashion, especially on fashion’s trickledown theory. This theory is essentially that the fashion elite dictate the trends that become all the rage. This cycle usually starts with New York Fashion Week, the most important week in fashion, where the top designers exhibit their collections and because this event is invitation-only, the audience is filled with celebrities, top magazine editors, and socialites. Once the designs are shown, the audience members will then buy/borrow the looks. Because we live in a culture that seeks to emulate the well known, the designs will then trickledown to everyday people. Because designs are now readily available to the public, bloggers can become ‘insiders’ through giving their commentary and even rejecting the trends that are being pushed. This is most evident in how fashion has worked for a while; America has always had style decades. The fifties called for pastels and year-round Easter Sunday clothes, the sixties were time for mod and hippie clothes, while the polyester and bell-bottoms prevailed in the seventies. The eighties were a time for bold colors and exaggerated silhouettes, the nineties called for dull colors and loose, baggy clothes, but what could be said for the fashion of this decade soon to be over? Most would answer that there are too many fashions just to say that a few pieces could define our decade’s fashion. This was all because of the Internet and its bloggers. The Internet gave bloggers the resources for bloggers and others interested in fashion to have a voice and speak forcefully with it, thus the various number of styles that the 2000s can call its own.

George Santayana once said that “fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.” Something very similar can be said about education; education is a system that is perpetuated without examination simply because it produces results and these aren’t the best possible. Ivan Illich puts it best from this excerpt from the article “Deschooling Society”: “The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have been tested and classified as potential money-makers or power-holders. No one is given tax funds for the leisure in which to educate himself or the right to educate others unless at the same time he can also be certified for achievement. Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university co-opts the discoverer and the potential dissenter.” Blogs are changing the very mechanism of fashion. No longer are the ‘certified’ fashion editors determining what becomes all the rage. With the backing of the Internet, people who simply seek to become fashion experts become just that, demonstrated best by Tavi Gevinson. Tavi Gevinson is the true champion of fashion blogging. Now age 13, she started her fashion blog at age 11 and because of the depth of her fashion analysis, she was invited to New York’s Fashion Week this year. Tavi became a fashion insider simply because she used all the resources the Internet offered and now is not only following fashion but setting it as well.

     When using Windows Movie Maker, you first import the videos or pictures you wish to use to make your movie. Then you arrange them in the order you would like them to play on the timeline at the bottom of the screen.

     The next step is to edit. There are several ways you can edit: split and combine clips, trim a video clip, add transitions between clips, add effects to parts of your movie, or add titles in certain parts of your movie. By adding transitions between clips, a transition controls how your movie plays from one video clip/ picture to the next. There are several different types of transitions and the transition length is determined by the overlap of the 2 clips. Effects on the other hand are special effects you apply to the clips. There are also several different choices for these special effects. You may also want to add a title, or titles, to your movie. Windows Movie Maker allows you to do this by giving you the option of putting a title anywhere you would like. You can also add special effects to these titles to add character to your movie.

     The final step in completing a movie on Windows Movie Maker is to publish it. When you finish working on a project, you can publish the project as a movie. You can share your movie with others in a number of ways—through your computer, on a recordable CD, as an attachment in an e‑mail message, or on videotape in a DV camera. And Ta Da! You’re finished!

     Windows Movie Maker has been in existence for about 9 years now. It was first created in 2000 with Windows Millennium.  This version, version 1.0, was much simpler and had more basic features than the most recent version on Windows 7. There are 8 versions of Windows Movie Maker in all:

-          2000 : Windows Movie Maker 1.0 (Windows Me)

-          2001 : Windows Movie Maker 1.1 (Windows XP)

-          2002 : Windows Movie Maker 2.0 (Windows XP)

-          2004 : Windows Movie Maker 2.1 (Windows XP SP2)

-          2004 : Windows Movie Maker 2.5 (Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005)

-          2006 : Windows Movie Maker 2.6 (Windows Vista)

-          2007 : Windows Movie Maker 6.0 (Windows Vista)

-          2009: Windows Movie Maker 7.0 (Windows 7)

     When Windows Movie Maker was first introduced to users, it was not really given too much attention because of the lack of special features it had compared to the iMovie (for Macs.) These shortcomings were realized and Microsoft decided to upgrade WMM in 2001 with version 1.1 which debuted with Windows XP. Version 1.1 featured DV AVI and WMV 8 video files creation.  In 2002, another free upgrade that included many new features was given to users called Windows Movie Maker 2. This was again updated in 2004 with WMM 2.1 and integrated in Windows XP SP2. Next, version 2.5 arrived, released in the same year which came with Windows XP Media Center Edition. This version featured additional transition effects as well as DVD burning functionality. Then in 2006, Windows Vista was released, along with another new version of WMM. This time the video making program came with even more features including new effects and transitions. A year later, Windows Movie Maker 6.0 was released. This version of the program supported DVR-MS and also has added support for HD video format. WWM6 came with a capture wizard that creates DVR-MS type files from HDV tapes. Most recently, a new version of WMM on Windows 7 has just been released. This version includes a new layout and many special effects the older versions did not have. Knowing Microsoft’s track record with this program, another version with new improvements is bound to come out soon!

     Like I mentioned earlier, there has been a debate about whether iMovie or Windows Movie Maker is the better video editing program. I read many blog posts and various other articles about this topic. The most repeated statements that kept appearing were these: “iMovie is too complicated; Windows Movie Maker is much simpler,” “Windows Movie Maker doesn’t have as many effects as iMovie does; iMovie is much better”, “Both are good programs and easy to use for being free.” My conclusion from these many arguments is that both programs are appreciated by users because they are free yet valuable. If you are looking for a simple program to make a basic video then Windows Movie Maker is your key. If you are looking to do more special effects and add “bling” to your video then iMovie is for you. It’s all about user preference.

     Unlike with film used in the film industry, when a user makes a movie using a medium such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie “…an edit doesn’t cause a physical change,” as Dr. C pointed out. With these free programs, special effects are much easier to add and scenes are much easier to tweak. Like Bill Viola says, “Life without editing, it seems, is just not that interesting.” In Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space, Viola, a high-profile video artist, encouraged artists to create “defamiliarizing forms of interaction” that would benefit the advancement of technology and possibly create new mediums.  Viola says that digital computers and software technologies are holistic, which by definition means “thinking as something as a whole; not by the many parts that make up the whole.” WMM is holistic software that can take complete videos and turn that medium into parts by adding them together making one long video like I did for my project. Or, it can take one video and break it into parts and edit them one by one turning them into something completely different.  

     Just like McCloud was able to write a comic about writing comics, I attempted to make a movie about making a movie using the new medium Windows Movie Maker. Like McCloud, I discuss the various features of my medium. He portrays the ways comics can be changed and altered to mean different things. Editing film or video can also have the same effects. Lengthening a box can mean more time is passing by in a comic; in film, a longer scene can also be edited to also portray that time is passing by. By adding special effects to video using mediums like WMM, you can make a video look like it is from a different time period, being filmed underwater, etc. Editing a comic relates in many ways to editing film because these alters can result in different meanings of the overall message of the medium.  

     This project turned out to be more complicated then I had originally thought. I had to film myself making a movie on Windows Movie Maker. I then had to make another movie using WMM to show myself making a movie. I ended up with 2 movies. The first shows how to make a movie using Windows Movie Maker, and the second is the movie I actually made (which is a movie describing WMM’s history.) So, in conclusion, I made a movie using Windows Movie Maker about making a movie using Windows Movie Maker about Windows Movie Maker. Whew. Complicated.

My Video: Windows Movie Maker

These authors say that the “World Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.” The Web we know today is definitely a pool of human knowledge and millions of humans share their knowledge and ideas every single day (sometimes with a common project….)

They then go on to describe what W3 defines. The first is Universal Resource Identifiers which “…are the strings used as addresses of objects on the Web.” The second is Hypertext Transfer Protocol, known more conventionally to us as “HTTP” which we see every time we get on the internet at the top of our browser. HTTP is ‘…a protocol for transferring information with the efficiency necessary for making hypertext jumps.” This data can be anything from images to just text. Following HTTP, the authors explain HTML. This came from the Web’s need of a common basic language for hypertext. HTML became that language and a lot of the Web was constructed from it.

The rest of the essay is comparing W3 to other systems and then the future of the Web. Regarding the future, in 1994 the Web was already a place of communication and learning, along with a marketplace, but it was not as easy to read and update as the designers would have liked it to be. They had many hopes for the future including a “easy-to-use servers for low-end machines to ease publication of information by small groups and individuals” among many other things. Since then, any human can confirm that the Web has improved light years in compared to what it was when it first began. The fact is that the Web is amazing; we talk about its uses and benefits every day in class. There’s way too many to list in one blog.

This incredible diversity of information that we have access to at the tip of our fingers and the promise of better technology in the future gives us a very good reason to be excited about what’s going to be available next.

When I was reading “Immigrant”, I could acknowledge that Maxine was an important character, but couldn’t put on a finger on what role she plays in the novella.

I first dissected. The name “Maxine” probably is a reference to the Latin “Maximus”, which means ‘ultimate’. So perphaps I started down the path assuming she was a mentor, but I scratched this idea quickly after reading that she wasn’t pretty well-versed in anything nor could she apprentice Bishop in any manner.

After a little bit, the role of Maxine just came to me. Maxine serves as an older sister to Bishop. Mind you, I know that this classification doesn’t fit into Jungian archetypal model, but this classification seems much more suiting.

The things that really make Maxine ‘sisterly’ are her familiarity, her advice, and the nature of her later talk with Bishop.

She assigns Bishop a pet name– Buster– and never fails to call him that. Sisters arbitrarily give out names, don’t ask for permission, and stick to them.

The advice she gives Bishop one is one that is directed from a hopeful place; she believes that Bishop won’t make the same mistakes she and the other Earthlings made.

Unfortunately, after the telling week has passed, Bishop had succumbed to the paradigm, but Maxine is not happy about it and displays how bitter she is about how things played out.

By this, though, she fails Bishop as a sister. Sisters are supposed to be suportive of their siblings’ endeavors, but then again, she’s “not her brother’s keeper”, is she?

Now, I must admit I am not a very big video game player. Sure, I play the traditional Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Wii Sports, etc. but I have never felt the desire to take the time to play a game on my computer or a console. So in this respect, much of the things Turkle mentions are new to me.

In the second section “The Myth of the ‘Mindless’ Addiction, Turkle compared video games and television. Not having played very many video games, I too thought they were very similar until she argued against that option. “Television is something you watch. Video games are something you do, something you do to your head, a world that you enter, and, to a certain extent, they are something you ‘become.’” She also says “…Video games are interactive computer micro worlds.” However, being very familiar with TV and movies I have to argue with her on a couple of her points. When Turkle says that video games are “something you do to your head, a world that you enter”, I have to argue that television and cinema can also have this effect. Why do you think people become frightened at scary movies? Because in their minds they are right beside the main character who is walking into the pitch black basement. While movies and shows on television aren’t interactive like video games, they still can allow a person to be in another world.

Turkle mentions several benefits of video games throughout the essay. “There is learning how to learn” (recursion!), while a player generalizes the strategies of a game after the game is mastered (which takes deciphering the logic, understanding the game designer’s intent, etc.) The patterns you pick up have to be more then memorized for this to happen, and Turkle says “…in a way it is beyond thinking.” Another benefit is “The video world knows no such bounds.” This reminded me of Lucasfilm’s Habitat because that world also did not have constraints such as the real world has. People can feel confident and powerful, relaxed and concentrated, or competitive and driven just by playing a video game. These may be some of the best feelings a human can have but some are unable to find them in the real world. Video games have now given these people that pleasure.

There are negative sides to video games however. Like the reader sees in the story of Jarish, he feels cut off from the real world because most of his time is spent in the computerized world. I wrote a paper in 8th grade about the effects of video games on kids and this was one of the main consequences. These kids also benefit from mastering the video games like Turkel mentions, but there are definitely negative side effects. You can “lose oneself.” Just like in 1984, today there is an infatuation with simulated worlds that some people discover and start to prefer them to the real.