Thursday, September 25, 2008

More Media Bios

We starteed with media biographies. More great projects on how people use media in their life.

- Gamers have a lot contribute to meda; largely by their participation
- Imitating real life media
- Train soldiers
- simulators
- Whole new market, new funding
- new hardware
- social impact (addictions)
- recruitment tool

- element of play important to participation
- only works if a lot are doing it
- transformative environment
- play as in plugging in to something or creativity

Question - Who am I? Who am I writing for? What do I have to say?
- Why are we blogging?
- Walter Ong, student of McLuhan
- Developed oral societies framework
- He was a practising Catholic Priest
- Transformation from oral to print
- Author's Audience is Always Fiction
- I don't know who they are, I don't know if they'll like me
- Audience imaginaire, you have to make up the audience
- you alwasy have one. who did you imagine
- anticipate who you want
- the "outsider" could be anybody (nameless, faceless)
- it's hard to write for
- act of creating the audience is harder
- creating audience creates the content
- made up who the audience is, because you don't know who they're gonna be
- in imagining an audience differently, you write differently

What is the role of the producer? What is your impact?
- sell them an idea
- not necessarily about selling
- convicing / compelling
- what influence
- insight
- "I don't blog b/c what's so important about me"
- many start with "I don't know who I"m writing for or if anyone will read..."
- as they get picked up, they change
- on very many levels we will
- by linking / not linking you create a community for sharing
- conditions for participation
- once there is a collision of blogs, there is a clash in audience
- not jsut interested in when theyr with you
- when you just put something out there, someone will read it
- or programmed a computer to link to other things

- If blog about self
- exposed
- defensive
- reliable (having to post) responsible, if you post something, post more
- self organising system, network
- not necessarily linear
- some linear, some orphaned, some non heirarchtical
- choice of platform pre-disposes type of participation

- platform determines behaviour - not in techno determinative way
- engaged a particular audience
- blogs regulated? ELUA CCRF HR

- Net Neutrality
- Who controls the internet?
- The owners of the servers?
- The owners of the content?
- What about network owner?
- multi layers of ownership
- EULA there to protect their business
- vast majority of users don't read EULA
- limited factors - set rules / parameters of participation
- us or the market that makes the demands
- what creates the conditions for change
- participation impacts for a limited time.
- those restrictions may be more important than what you are allowed
- make you self edit
- evolves sometimes out of interest

- no course in audience studies at York
- you don't own the content once you publish according to some EULA
- sometimes we imagine the audience two fold: who we want to see it, and whose rules we have to abide by
- different layers - audience we don't want to offend when we find the audience we want to
- imagine that the restrictive audience is a thing. But no more real than anything else. just as made up.

-Engaging in the participation - audeince, content, production
- transform yoursleve from this is a wide open thing to an active participation uadience
- it will be perfect for your audience

-if there is grnad narraive judging you - you do nothing

- Question of flow
- where do the things you see/read come from

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Participation
- Internal vs External participant
- How do you define participation
- Do you have to be a professional / amateur?
- How do you gauge participation?
- How many layers are there?
- What depth?
- Transformation of how we work with the mediums
- Social difference?
- knowledge difference?
- http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm
- Arguably the kids now are physiologically different
- Digital Native vs Digital Immigrant
- Participation by engaging by traffic? Do you have to be in and there? Not just driing by like everyone else? Not part of the traffic
- If everyone else is doing it and I don't, am I still participating? What if everyone is doing it and I question it?
- What if I don't do it on purpose?

- Is there a fundamental difference between how we communicate? Big words vs txt speak

Class exercise:
Link to everyone's blog.
Rules:
Cannot pass notes.
Cannot yell across the room.

Solution:
Facebook group: SOSC 4330 on the York University Network

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

First Post

It has been a very tumultuous start to the school year. I've already feel like I'm under a mountain of stress. Although I'm not behind, it certainly feels that way.

As most people that know me already know, I'm not one to stick it out to write things down. (Unless it's something important that I need to remind myself of later. Or it's a "to do" item.) I have owned several blogs over the last few years. All of them have been because of school. I have never felt the urge to write, so this 'assignment' is not different. And if you really must know, those blogs have all fallen into a virtual graveyard. I have no idea what happened to them, nor do I feel the need to resurrect them. At the same time, I really don't remember most of them. But the most recent one can be found at:

www.fuzzytravel.com/fngo

Feel free to request posts on any topic that relates to the course. The last blog was the most successful of all the other blogs as I wrote in it more than five times. Let's hope this one is better than the last.