The RIAA campaign against music downloaders has apparently had an effect according to news sources like, Slyck News – The State of Music Downloading. Something like a third of the people who used to download have stopped or lessened because of the suits launched by the RIAA and the associated publicity.
What does this mean for the Internet and P2P sharing?
Continue reading File-sharing behavior
A rant. A common story told in journalism school is that what they teach is “storytelling” (for example, see Storytelling in journalism.) A couple of years ago I noticed that everytime I visited a communications programme or journalism programme I was told they were into the business of “storytelling” as if this was some deep discovery or a secret hidden from the rest of us. The implication was that initiates (journalism students) were taught to give up naive views of what they would learn inorder to learn creative writing. Journalism as a discipline told itself a story that excused it from such mundane challenges as understanding, accuracy and timeliness in order to become a creative art closely allied with public relations (otherwise known as propaganda.) They believed their own story and now we pay for it by having to read papers that are little more than collections of columns (where the columnist is the story), fictions (that entertain the reader), and editor’s reflections about the media (navel gazing.) Google News is the refreshing antidote – news (not stories) that is aggregated by algorithm (not storytelling). Read on for more ranting…
Continue reading Journalism and Storytelling
What is text on a computer?
A brief introduction to code pages and Unicode is a good overview of code and text.
The point is that on the computer there are just sequences of binary digits. The data doesn’t include the information needed to decode the sequences. (Even the sequencing is coded.) To get recognizable text one needs a lookup table that maps code points to abstract characters and from there to glyphs that look right. To get text you need a system with enough variety to handle the characters you want – it is the difference between the codes that makes text – something the poststructuralists realized at a different register.
Continue reading The Difference of Code Points
Semiotics of Multimedia: Intro is a text book on the theory of multimedia by Bo Fibiger for courses at Aarhus University in Denmark. Excellent overview of definitions and theory.
Continue reading Semiotics of Multimedia
Afterimage: EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director.(multimedia authoring software)(Evaluation) is a philosophical review of Macromedia Director that looks at the frame/score metaphor for organizing media over time and connects this to John Cage and Gilles Deleuze.
It would be interesting to trace back the history and theory of the musical score that seems to underlie the Flash/Director model for organizing multimedia over time. While Goldberg connects multimedia authoring to cinema, I think we have to go back to musical notation and Guido D’Arezzo.
Continue reading The Multimedia Score
Vitanza, E5334, HyperText & Multimedia, Syllabus is a site for a graduate course on “Topics in Stylistics” where students have to read theory and do transcoding (ekphrasis both ways).
The course draws on the pictorial turn or picture theory of Mitchell – icons and logoi.
Continue reading Pictorial Turn
We can extend Bakhtin’s argument about the novel being a genre that incorporates in dialogical form other written genres to theorize multimedia. Multimedia is to other media as the novel to other written genres. It uses interactivity to combine time-dependent and time-independent media into coherent works. The interface design and programming bring these media into dialogue with each other.
Continue reading MetaMedia and Amateurism
More on Abstracting Craft by McCullough. (See previous blog entries.)
How is code a medium? Code, symbols, abstractions, notation, structure, generative structure, mental models – terms McCullogh plays with.
The computer forces us to encode that which we want to manipulate. On the computer we simply manipulate codes – symbols. We develop structures of codes for different purposes. That is what a software tool does – it presents us with a structure within which to play. Unlike crafts that deal with physical media, craft on the computer resembles disciplines that deal with notations like music or writing. Good software and good digital craftspeople don’t think of the medium as code, but develop mental models based often on virtual realities. They think of drawing not CLUTs.
The structures developed on computers are not in reality – they are generative structures – designed to constrain in order to generate. They open a particular set of possibilities – like a painting program that lets you do certain things.
Continue reading Symbolic Media
McCullough writes a lot about generative structure, drawing on Chomsky and Piaget. While generative structure may no longer be a satisfactory explanation for human language, McCullough sees is as a principle of computing media.
“We have seen the role of structure, particularly generative structure, in several contexts already: the syntax of notation, the design of an interface, the constructions of a type, the essence of a medium. In each of these contexts, structure is revealed in transformation.” (p. 232 of Abstracting Craft)
We learn about the structure of digital media by playing with it – by playing with a software package and seeing what sorts of transformations happen when we try different features. (See the section “Generative Structure” in the chapter “Symbols” – starting page 98.)
This connects to play and games. Generative structures provide the constraints that make play possible and open the possibilities that give play meaning.
Continue reading Generative Structure
The third chapter in Abstracting Craft on “Tools” has definitions of technology and tool suited for discussing software and computers as craft tools. Some of the key terms he covers are:
Tool, Technology, Instrument, Probe, Mechanism, Machine, Engine, Power, Technique, Medium, and Artifact
“A tool is a moving entity whose use is initiated and actively guided by a human being, for whom it acts as an extension, toward a specific purpose.” (p. 68, McCullough).
Continue reading Tool and Technology