The Beached Whale

Now that I’m running on more than 3 hours of sleep I’ll try to explain what I want to do with my project.  The idea is still a work in progress, but maybe it’ll expand a bit as I write this blog.

I suppose I’ll need to watch the entirety of the “Mother of All Demos” as a starting point.  From there, I’ll pare it down to some of the key points and demonstrations of concepts that have survived to today, as well as some that are maybe beyond what we’re using today, which I could save for the end, as to close the video with some questions and suggestion of possibilites for the future.  My hope is to use some video from the presentation, and use the audio as a voiceover for the whole video, ideally in such a way that it almost feels like the audio was made to match the video rather than the other way around.  Again, what I have in mind is a bit like I Met the Walrus, only with a different visual style, with greater emphasis on a clean, “computer-generated” look created using a combination of 2D and 3D effects.  My current concept for the opening of the video is to start with the setup of the video conferencing, but make it appear as though Engelbart and his coworker are conferencing each other using modern computer software with video conferencing capabilities.  I could then expand on this through text (presumably part of an IM conversation within the conferencing program), which would gradually lead to an increasingly abstract, animation-based environment as the video progresses.

Oh, ‘on a side note,’ here is a word cloud of my blog thus far.  I’m wondering if this means I should look into trying out some other superlatives.  It makes me wonder what a word cloud of my speech would look like.

Well, that was a very dense essay, and it was also fairly long.  I mean, in terms of quantity it wasn’t an unreasonable assignment, but I really wonder whether reading it like this is very productive.  There’s so much there that there’s no way I could really address most of it in a blog entry, not to mention really dig into any more than a little bit of it in terms of reading and understanding.  It’d take weeks to unpack this entire essay (or many of the other readings in this class, for that matter) thoroughly.  Is it more beneficial to get a shallow overview of a bunch of ideas than to really understand a few ideas?  I’m just thinking out loud here.  Or in print, rather.  There’s certainly a balance to be considered here, so I’m not saying that this is necessarily what is happening in this class, but I do know this essay and several of the others primarily went over my head.

It reminds me of something my Great Texts professor said about a really dense work we were reading, to the effect that it would be better for us to read a couple page thoroughly rather than try to read the whole reading assignment in a broader sense, because that doesn’t really take you anywhere.  That was after we were quizzed over the entirety of the reading for a grade, naturally.

I thought there were some interesting ideas and I agreed with a lot of the criticisms of the current system, I thought Illich also did a good job of addressing the fact that it’s not just the current education system that is problematic, but also the entire society that it is built around, of which the current education system is simply a product.  That’s a pretty bleak starting point, even if Illich did some suggestions for changes.

Regarding my final project: I haven’t done much with it.  I have a couple big projects to finish up for other classes in the near future, so once those are finished I’ll probably start working a little more regularly on it.  I still need to narrow down exactly what I want to focus on.

Regarding other peoples’ final projects: The notions of the user-based ones are nice but in all honesty I think the chances of them succeeding are very slim.  Short of begging friends to participate, it’s very difficult to build up an online community, particularly one based around user-generated content, and it’s not going to happen in a month.  The only way an online community can spring up in a month is if it’s based around some revolutionary new software or idea, or is funny & memorable.  Even then, you’d need a lot of luck and/or connections to get any real results in this short a time.

I thought this was an interesting read, Viola’s ideas on the future of video technology, circa 1982, seemed to be pretty accurate, at least from a technical standpoint.  Although 29.97 fps is still the standard in video, and that is what everybody uses for broadcast, internet video is much less consistent.  And every region has a slightly different standard of course.  Which reminds me, did you hear about Pres. Obama giving the British PM some Region 1 DVDs as a gift?  (DVD players in the UK can’t play them.)

Anyway, the other thing that stuck out to me in this article was Viola’s discussion of art and realism, the essential idea being that trying to recreate reality in a literal fashion through art is something of a vain effort given that it’ll just be an inferior copy of the real thing.  Or at least I think that is what Viola was saying.  I agree to a point, but at the same time I think that realism is a perfectly valid way of creating artwork; it can be a great way to learn the principles (see Picasso’s early work) and it is not as though an artist would necessary portray something that exists in real life exactly as it appears in the picture.  This allows the artist to create an artificial reality that is different from anything in real life, does it not?

At the same time, the comment on unedited video tapes, the closest facsimile of real life, being really boring is valid.  Perhaps this is why most of the videos people make by running around with a video camera at family events rarely are watched afterward, it’s just not nearly as much fun as the original experience to experience it via a removed, much less involving window.  The movie Cloverfield rides this line in the opening 20 minutes or so, which consist of a guy with a camcorder trying to film a goodbye party.  Even here, artificial “editing” is created via the camera being turned off from time to time during the party, but nevertheless it felt quite real and because of this I had trouble staying attentive through this introduction.  Making the party shorter would have made it less convincing and realistic, but then there is a reason that movies don’t include every second of action like real life does.

I was a little surprised this segment was included in the book, given that comics are not at all a new art form and would not seem to connect to computers and technology.  It was very interesting stuff, though I thought the panel demonstrating how a single image could convey an extended duration of time brought up an interesting dilemma – it did seem that McCloud’s work really reflected both the idea of using something to study itself and also McLuhan’s maxim that the medium is the message – so much of what McCloud demonstrates in the excerpt would be tedious and still require drawn examples if it were formatted in traditional text.  Perhaps there was more to it than this, but I felt that the main connection to new media was that this was a very blatant example of the medium being the message.

Comics could also be taken back to the window metaphor, in that they are set up as a series of windows showing events from multiple perspectives and in different ways – in one panel a man might be nothing more than a purple silhouette, but in the next he could be fully detailed even though lighting in the room could not possibly have changed.  These changes in seem natural in comics even though they make no sense if we try to apply them to a real-world framework.  Unlike most films and TV shows, comics can portray events in multiple angles and manners at the same time.  As a result the viewer is drawn in and forced to choose exactly how to view the media.  Ang Lee’s Hulk and the show 24 are two exceptions that come to mind, though they use the device of multiple panels more as a stylistic choice than to convey a great deal of additional information or meaning.  When DVDs systems were designed one of the capabilities that was included was the ability to change camera angle, but beyond a few extra features this hasn’t proven to be a popular feature.  Film is, after all, a diegetic medium, meaning it tells rather than shows.  That might seem the opposite of what we’re inclined to think, but the meaning behind this is that the filmmaker has a lot of control over what the film is telling us about something, not necessarily through words or text but through visual choices such as lighting and cinematography.  Because filmmakers want this control in order to have the greatest control over what is being “told” to the viewer, offering the viewer the ability to change camera angles at will would be a hard sell.  The technology could, however, have uses in broadcasts of live events.

The spam filter isn’t working for me; I still had 74 new spam messages, many of them coming in just today.  I checked plugins and I don’t see anything there to enable, but I got the impression this shouldn’t be necessary anyway?

Looking over the reading objectives again, I noticed that much of our 4 points was based around specific examples of technology.  I think what we’ve actually studied since then has been shaped more by the readings we hadn’t read at the time, thus the original ‘objectives,’ while a nice stab in the dark, aren’t really very close to what we’ve been learning about in the class.  The objectives are pretty dependent on specific examples applying some of the early concepts we explored in the readings, but most of our discussion since then seems to have more emphasis in the theoretical.

I still haven’t nailed down a central thesis for my project, there are so many different ideas I could work from.  I think I have enough to begin work on it though.

A few days ago I became the new administrator of Bricksinmotion.com, so that’s been an interesting experience so far.

I was looking forward to the Introduction to the New Media Consortium Lecture.  Unfortunately I didn’t know when or where it would be until it had passed.

‘Mindstorms’ was an interesting read, it seems that Papert expresses a lot of the same ideas as Nelson did in his article, although with a different approach, particularly toward the criticism.  Interesting that he never mentions Nelson in the article, at least as far as I could see.

The fear that Papert references of people being disconnected from each other was interesting to me, because it does seem to be a reality on some level, or at least the idea gets some visibility in culture even today:

Coca Cola Superbowl Ad

(I couldn’t figure out how to get an embedded video working)

We haven’t become like Nineteen Eighty-Four, but there certainly are plenty of people who become so obsessed with WoW and Secondlife that they begin to ignore reality.  At the same time though it does seem oddly inaccurate to suggest that these people are ignoring the outside world when in fact the whole idea is based around interacting with real people all over the world.  In some ways, I can communicate faster, more effectively, and more efficiently via a text chat than I can by talking with someone face to face; if both people can type quickly, it allows them to essentially talk at the same time and still catch everything the other person is saying, and because the information is written it is more concise and edited than common speech would be.  Certainly if I’m explaining something very technical involving lots of variables and numbers, it’s going to be much easier to communicate it over a text chat than talking in person.

It was neat to see Papert use the QWERTY concept as a parallel, applying it to something totally different from the example I had applied it to.  I think it does, again, point out some of the problems with Nelson’s idea of really simple, logical control systems.

Any chance of getting an anti-spam plugin?

Which will make blogging a little more of a challenge since I’ll have to start using the computer lab once I send it off to be repaired – the backlight is broken and I’m currently using a wall projector instead of the screen.  Apparently this happened when I was taking the laptop back after class – it got bumped around a bit but I am surprised that it was this fragile.

It really is nice to have a “personal computer.”  It seems strange that people didn’t initially see the potential benefit of owning a computer instead of “time-sharing,” but without many of the uses that Engelbart and others demonstrated I can see how it would be hard to believe that there should be a glorified calculator in every home.

What an evening.   Two excerpts from McLuhan, the first 8 cantos of Purgatorio, and a can of Chef Boyardee’s “Pepperoni Pizzazaroli.”  Which sounded delicious when I bought it at the HEB, but in retrospect I think maybe I should have respected the classics, like beefaroni.  I was pleasantly surprised, however, by HEB’s own generic canned pasta, I actually thought the meatballs were slightly superior to Chef Boyardee.  Then again, I didn’t eat them consecutively perhaps it’s not fair to judge.

Regarding the comments: sadly, all of them consisted of random text and links to what appeared to be generic pharmeceutical websites.  I’m not quite sure what ‘Nicovumliwose’ and others intended for me to learn from their lengthy comments, but hopefully now that I’ve marked them as spam, the wordpress software will find the common thread here?  Or does will I keep having to sort through them manually?

So, now to business.  Judging from everybody except me’s previous blog entry, it would seem we were supposed to blog about our project ideas.  I didn’t catch that, so I’ll do it now.  My idea isn’t fully plotted out yet, that’s what spring break is for, right?  But really, I’m planning to make a computer animated video about an aspect of new media as we’ve learned about it in this class, and post it on YouTube.  I haven’t figured out exactly what I want to include in terms of ‘content,’ a term I’m really reluctant to use in explaining my project idea in light of the McLuhan readings, especially since I have a fairly concrete idea of how I want the video to look.  As I mentioned previously there is some inspiration from [i]I Met the Walrus[/i], primarily in the sense of conveying ideas rapidly through a conglomeration of animation, sound, and words.  At the moment I’m leaning toward having some instrumental music on top but no narration, my hope is to convey some theory or idea about new media through several aspects of new media itself in an exciting and involving matter.  A while back I delicious’d a site that generates “Word Clouds,” this was a really unique and powerful form of expressing information that I had never seen before, and I love the way it looks so I might try to integrate something along those lines.

As far as the specific element I want to address, I haven’t completely decided yet.  I don’t want this to be totally unfocused, so it might be better to focus on the ideology of a specific source that we’ve read in the class.  At this point, though, I’m not sure if I want to directly base it one person’s ideas (Engelbart, for example) or put together elements of several peoples’ ideas, including my own, regarding one focal point, in order to synthesize something a little more unique.

Then again, is there such a thing as originality?  Or is everything at this point just new recombinations of previously existing ideas?

Edit: One more new and insightful comment was submitted while I was writing this post!  Keep ‘em coming folks, I’m a great admirer of cheap pharmeceuticals and fake Rolex watches.

Kay makes an interesting observation in the video when he talks about how even seemingly innovative thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas apparently didn’t think to test their ideas on gravity.  Aristotle in particular had some detailed ideas on how the velocity with which an object falls is proportional to its mass, something that simply isn’t true and, furthermore, is very easy to prove false.  In the video, Kay shows some kids deciding to test this to see what happens when two objects of different masses are dropped, and suggests that not until Galileo did someone take the more child-like approach of actually trying it, a seemingly obvious solution that is a lot better than just theorizing.  Have adults (even in Aristotle’s time) become that analytical and conditioned that some of the most obvious solutions are no longer even considered?  And is this natural or is it an effect of how the young are educated and brought up, with an end goal of making them ‘think’ (to use the term loosely) just like everyone else?

That’s right: by the 1990s, some schools began introducing commercially available software that was functionally comparable to, but less sophisticated than, what the kids participating in PARC’s Dynabook research program developed.

Behold: the Thinkin' Things chicken-designing machine, circa 1993

Not that simplistic, fun educational, and now nostalgic software like Thinkin’ Things,  is a bad thing, but it is kind of crazy to think that in 1977 middle schoolers were developing more sophisticated software.  Granted, the examples from the essay indicate simplistic design that lacks the colorful appeal of programs developed commercially for kids and probably aimed at a slightly younger audience, but I imagine that designing these kinds of programs would be a much more worthwhile and rewarding learning experience for kids than playing with an interactive chicken designing machine.

Of course, Thinkin’ Things was geared toward perhaps one of the lowest age groups (I remember using it in kindergarten and 1st grade) and I think some of the slightly higher level stuff like Math Blaster and the Zoombinis games were good examples of what could be done with the technology of the time in terms of making learning more fun.  As an aside, it’s interesting to note that developers didn’t just use this technology to make intricate puzzle-solving fun for kids, so-called “adventure games” like the Myst series, which began around the same time, is geared at an older audience.

Why must the Uru incorporate fun and interactive puzzle-based games into every facet of their technology?

Unlike what Kay and Goldberg were hoping for, programming today is a sort of mysterious skill only known by the most learned of geeks.  I don’t think this is because of a lack of interest; when I was in elementary school I was determined to learn some programming, and after a few weeks of working at this I managed to write a Java applet that drew a red diagonal line.  And that was using a detailed tutorial.  Computer programming has become very unaccessible to the uninitiated, which is in keeping with the paradigm that a poweful system may require some upfront learning.  It wouldn’t be practical to make deep, massively intricate programs with an easy-to-learn language like Kay’s “Smalltalk,” but simplistic tools like Smalltalk can still serve a purpose.  I don’t know how many kids would really be drawn to writing their own programs, even if it was much easier than it is now, but the idea does seem to have a lot of potential as a teaching tool in itself, because making a program would usually teach a person more than just using it.

I also don’t know just how easy to learn Smalltalk was, I’m sure that Kay and Goldberg wanted to make a good impression in their essay so it’s not a reliable source to get a good idea of just how simple the language was for kids to learn, but the success they had with it seems to suggest that it was easy enough that kids wouldn’t give up in despair after a few days of fruitless labor, which was my experience with Java.  In high school I took a class in Basic, which doesn’t quite live up to its name, even if it is simpler than most programming languages.

I will say that there has been some great educational, creative software out there over the years, though most of the examples that come to mind haven’t achieved large-scale success.  The fact that applications like Game Maker, 3D Movie Maker, RPG Toolkit, and other well-made programs like them have only enjoyed popularity in very small niche communities makes me wonder if Kay is really correct that this is something most students would even like or take interest in.  This goes back to the question of whether, on average, students are up to the challenge of opportunities like these, that require a lot more thought and display of intelligence than what the current educational system asks.  To be fair, these kinds of programs and opportunities aren’t promoted in school at all so it’s difficult to know what effect they’d have if they were better promoted from an educational standpoint.  Only kids who somehow came to be interested in creative software outside of school would even be aware it exists.

-Philip, who instinctively formatted this entire post in BBCode before he realized he was posting on a blog, not a messageboard.