Ferny

I like to think that I have fairly consistent in how I consume media for the past couple of years. I watch videos online, discover images on social media, and I listen to music. However, one specific type of media that I notice myself using more often is the podcast, usually during work or when doing housework. Although there are specific definitions of what a podcast is, I hold my own (which is within the ballpark I think). Whenever I’m listening to some other than music on my computer or mobile device, and I don’t need to engage with the media visually, the media is basically a podcast to me.

Obviously, podcasts are more of a modern version of radio programming, and match them very eerily. It’s hard to pin down all the broad and obscure subjects that have ever been covered every radio station and doubly so for podcasts. They often revolve around or create personalities that become as much of a part of the show as it’s designated content. We also, of course, listened to the radio during work. I think the creators of podcasts know they’re the new radio talk show hosts, and it’s interesting how this old form of media was able to pass itself to the next generation despite the evolution of technology.

Now that spring break is behind me, another blog post must be written

My last blog post happened to be about the last proper lecture we had in this class before transitioning to midterm workshops, so instead of talking about a previous lecture, I want to talk about my thoughts on the upcoming group work we need to do.

There’s always a looming sense of doom or anxiety when you’re told about a big project that you must undertake. That happens to be my initial reaction to any new work, and I expect my group mates are a bit apprehensive as well.

Regardless, I’m actually not too worried about the whole “working with others” thing. I’ve done group work throughout my academic life, and I’m at least comfortable working with a variety of people.

I’ve got together with some classmates for this group project, including Bryan Cancel, who I look forward to working with. He’s a real perfectionist and he knows it, and tells people about. I think every strong group really needs a guy like him, someone who keeps us on our toes, evolving and improving our work. At the same time though, I know he has a lot of respect for boundaries of discussion and the input of others.

On Tuesday in class we had a brief discussion over a web article published by the academic journal Kairos. I want to blog about this article written by Susan H. Delgrange and the things it touches upon.

It’s very fitting that Kairos is the name of the journal that published this article was published by. Kairos is the name for the ancient greek concept of the fleeting moment, the opportune time. Ancient thinkers used this word as the most important resource in rhetoric, to be flexible and strike decisively with the right arguments. At the same time, this concept is what Delgrange is trying to capture in her Wunderkammer, of which the article is about. In old times a Wunderkammer was the precursor to a museum, a place where observers can view and interact with it’s artifacts from different angles in order to discover a meaning, order, or history to them, and find a proper arrangement for this evidence, or make sense of the existing arrangement set by the curator. This active and tangible learning process is contained in the fleeting moment, where the puzzle of the Wunderkammer is solved.

Artificially creating some interactivity to engage and teach an audience is an underrated art. Although teaching through doing is probably older than stone tools, today’s technology lets us make peculiar virtual environments. Wunderkammer does not have a linear structure, the observer can freely interact with everything in display and at their own pace. In order to fulfill it’s goal Wunderkammer must be are carefully planned and deliberately laid out in order to allow for natural, voluntary learning process without frustrating or boring the observer.

This week seemed especially stressful for both us and the instructor. On both days we were tasked with brainstorming pertinent questions concerning the texts we were assigned each of those days. I felt that, although the content of these texts were shown to useful to technical writers, the exercise wasn’t about properly absorbing the information in the text and synthesizing our own ideas and opinions about them. Rather, it was more about gauging our progress as technical writers in the end. So I find it difficult to write about the readings, because I don’t personally believe the readings, in themselves, were the substance of our week’s work. Either way, I’ll still try.

The most enjoyable reading of the week was “Stop. Hey. What’s That Sound?” by Ken Jordan, and for a good reason. An important topic in his article was the computerization of sound and how that has redefined sound. As a “computer guy” I found much of what he said very interesting. To a computer, all things are merely ones and zeros, so a sound file, and image file, a text file, are all essentially the same thing when broken down.

It’s much more complicated than that in real life though, especially in the past when computer formats and hardware was much more diverse (read: incompatible). A good example would in old computer hardware, especially video game console hardware, which only recently had begun to take up standard architectures and formats. In the past, due to limitations in hardware and disk space, sound and music would be done by manipulating the channels from which music was synthesized, this is what resulted in the mechanical, robotic beeps and noise of early computers. As time went on, widely used music formats were made based on being sequences of compact instrument samples, another disk space saving solution. Only at the beginning of the era of CDs, after floppy disks died out, did realistic sound formats that recorded waveforms become widespread in use, though the technology was available for a long time. This last one, I believe, has the most potential for it’s bits to be reinterpreted into a variety of formats as Jordan elaborates on. Unlike the other modes in which we’ve encoded music in, this one truly represents what sound is made of, namely waves.

Here I will blog about commonplaces. A commonplace is a widespread idea or belief, generally held by members of a society.

The idea that there are these shadowy, silent, invisible things that underpin our perception of everything is pretty spooky. Not necessarily wicked or innocuous, but I see that commonplaces do have a deep impact on our self awareness, and our awareness of others. Something like a “seeing the Matrix” effect is attained when you sit down and try to identify a commonplace, or are told of one by someone else.

Though, I believe there is no need to jump the gun when it comes to uncovering a commonplace. I think trying to discover a society’s core unspoken beliefs and values when you are a member of said society requires a lot of time in introspection, extraspection, reinspection, and all the other -spections before posing any theories. Otherwise, you could be wrong, and no one like being wrong, I suspect.

Though sometimes one knows a few in an instant. Something very suspicious is that most of my group members independently wrote “Knowledge is Power” as a commonplace in lists they made during the lecture. Some commonplaces seem to have been drilled into our psyche, usually in the form of short, memorable pieces.

Blog Post #1 is MIA.

So I wanted to write about copyrights and fair use. Felt like the, uh, lecture we had on it was so far the most important. It’s very relevant to the students as future content creators and especially relevant to someone like me as a person who wants to spend the rest of his like coding and doing computer stuff like that.

Unfortunately, I was not particularly interested in the examples presented in class. I can see the value in teaching through a popular medium like popular music, that’s a wide net that will catch a lot of fish. I wasn’t particularly engaged by them though, to the point that I barely remember them. Sorry, I’m just way outside of that area of interest. I was instead thinking about silly computer stuff.

SO, I’m very familiar with the clashes software creators have had with copyright owners. The Free Software Movement is a thing that’s still alive and kicking. For those who are unaware, the FSM is a movement that wants to propagate the practice of editing and sharing source code, which is something copyright owners usually forbid. More info about it all over the internet. I have entertained the idea of releasing the source code to whatever thing I make on my own, which is easy to do when you haven’t made much of anything on your own...| There are many examples of important people who do this though, and it’s good that they’re there. Lord knows I’ve benefited from them devolving the power they held for mankind and the greater good. I feel this is one of the areas in which copyright owners aren’t as strong as they are in other industries like music and film, which is good. These sort of ideas were constantly floating around in my head as the class went on, so I felt the need to write all this junk about it.