Entry 2

Most of us take for granite that most of the media we have today did not exist before the late 1890’s. I was fascinated how the first computers where developed simultaneously for mathematics and art. Before reading about the evolution of media In Language of New Media I did not give much thought to the fact that my laptop has a screen, keyboard, mouse, and buttons, that allow me to visual interact and manipulate the interface. Although the New Media reading was interesting, the material was quite dense and in some cases it was hard to follow, not because it was confusing but because the mass amount of information was overwhelming, sometimes. I found Converging Culture to be a much easier read. Maybe that is because I am more familiar and comfortable with reality TV, or maybe the format felt less academic and more like a consumer book. Regardless, the idea of collective knowledge is interesting to me and I agree that in an internet era we are moving toward that direction. For instance thanks to social networking I have instant access to hundreds of people that I can easily tap for information. If I am working on a project and I need to know something technical about computers, I have a friend for that, or I want to know whether a restaurant is good I can Yelp it. I also thought how the chat boards all had some knowledge that everyone knew, yet had elite groups that worked on different projects and published their finding to everyone was interesting. Even though I have only watched Survivor for classes, I still thought the author made a good choice about using this as an example because everyone knows what Survivor is even if they do not follow each episode. Just as the competitors on survive join social groups, this week I joined Linkedin. This is a business social network. You have options to fill out information about previous jobs you have had, include when you worked there and your position. You can use the website to read peoples professional profiles and also join professional groups, for instance Ford Motor company, that by the way is integrating lots of interesting new media into their models. Talking about new media I downloaded another game onto my iPhone. This was in incredibly simple where you literally are told not to push a red button. So, if you follow the instruction then you just stare at a box and ignore the temptation to push the button. If you push the button then a story line ensues, yet the story line never changes, so the game gets boring quite quickly. That is the point I believe because you can buy additional stories for $1. I still think that making the stories boring so you will buy more is a bad business model. Another app I downloaded is called Loopt and I thought this would be interesting because I remembered it being demoed at Macworld 2008. The app itself is cool, essential it uses the GPS software in the phone to figure out your current location and if you have friends on Loopt, you can see them if they share their location. The idea is you could be sipping coffee at Starbucks, and then realize your friend Jill is just three blocks away and so you could text her and hang out. The problem is that I have only one friend who has the app, so it is rather pointless. For new media apps this week, I downloaded an app from Logitech that is suppose to let my iPhone turn into a trackpad. This was my dud app because I could not get it to work. Even looking at the troubleshooting guide was not of much help. Fortunately the NBC app was much better. This app lets me follow the Olympics, including who has won the most medals, which and that is one of the first elements you see. That is great because that is what I care about most. I also like how I can watch video highlight that I might have missed, and read the athletes twitter updates, if I feel like it. It would be nice if the stories could be organized by event or athlete, so in some ways the user interface could benefit with allowing for customization. Actually there are categories, but you have to touch the screen three times just to get to them, which is annoying. So, not a perfect app, but most the the videos I want to watch are featured on the home screen, so it works for me.