Assignment: New Media Definition - Jenkins

a. How does your capstone measure up according to the definition proposed in Henry Jenkins' "Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape"? For this entry, describe the principle that your project fits best and the one it fits worst. How might you alter your project to fit better?

The principle that best fits our project is Appropriative, since we are technically taking something that already exists (the internet and the hardware and webpages it contains) and re imagining it as something else.

What fits our project the least, and may be unavoidable, the the Everyday principle. Since our project is really based on exploring "for the fun of it," it would be very hard to make it a staple of everyday life. But games have their place in lives, too. They can be an escape, a learning tool, or just something to idly click away at when bored. With a project that is based on something that is constantly shifting and changing, like the internet, perhaps the changes will incur enough interest to at least make people want to look at it regularly. But, as brought up in the last post, technological constraints are the main thing barring is from making this project as "living" as it can be. Google may be able to afford the computing power and bandwidth to constantly scan and update their database of the internet, but we will have to opt for slower, less frequent ways of changing the landscape.

b. Do you agree or disagree with Jenkins' definition, and why?

It is definitely lighter on the technical side, and more heavy on the cultural side, but it is also a good breakdown of what we consider New Media to be. Manovich might disagree, since Jenkins kind of blankets every type of technology into his definitions and principles, but the concept is solid.

I don't agree with the way he decided to not focus on the technology in his definition, though. It would be like talking about how the automobile revolutionized transportation without considering the cars, and how they were built and produced. Technology is the driving force of New Media, and advancements in the way it is made (better, faster, cheaper) is what drives the changes - the cultural driving force is nowhere near as influential. If Microsoft did not make Windows cheaper, easier, and more widely available to users, who knows where the PC market, and consequentially, the software market would be currently. (Cue rabid Mac fanatics.)

Assignment: New Media Definition - Manovich

a. How does your capstone measure up according to the definition proposed in Lev Manovich's "What Is New Media?" For this entry, describe the principle that your project fits best and the one it fits worst. How might you alter your project to fit better?

Out of the five principles described in Manovich's chapter, I think our project fits the Transcoding principle the best. Our main objective in this project is to make the user visualize the internet as something familiar to them - planets, solar systems, and galaxies. We all learned about the planets and their differences in content, their rotations around the sun, at an early age, yet (for some of us) the internet came later. By showing webpages and how they can connect to each other, via HTML links or physical routers, it should begin to form an image that is a lot like our solar system, with large aggregates of links or major routers forming the suns.

The weakest is likely to be the Variability category. While our project could exist in several different views, based on the connections we make, the input to the program is still entirely dependent on the content generated by others. The best way to counteract this is to either add more variability in the way we display the content, by making different connections between the "planets" and "suns" and displaying them differently, or pulling different types of content from the webpages. Of course, the biggest barrier to variability will be what is technologically possible to compute, both in what is made available and what we have the computing power to do.

b. Do you agree or disagree with Manovich's definition, and why?

It is definitely a more thorough definition of what constitutes New Media, but a more technical definition that deals with the nitty-gritty parts and less of the overall concept of New Media. Unless, of course, he went over that in a section other than Principles of New Media, which I will freely admit is the only section I read, to save myself some time.

However, technically, his definition is beautifully thorough. He clearly separates new media from what people might mistake it for, such as old media converted to a digital format. It is a good breakdown of everything we think of as "new media."

Assignment: New Media Definition - Crosbie

a. How does your capstone measure up according to the definition proposed in Vin Crosbie's "What Is New Media?" How might you alter your project to fit better?

As it stands right now, our internet "game" concept is rather one-sided. Instead of being a fully interactive program, with as much user input as program output, it instead delivers the visuals to the user in a certain way, and they are unable to change it. The problem with using the internet as the content generator is that while the user can view webpages, there isn't a whole lot they can do to edit them - they can just look at what the designer chose to show you. So, our project, which relies on the contents of websites for it's visuals, is rather fixed.

Since giving users the ability to alter the visuals, and hence the websites, is of questionable legality, we must make up for the deficiency in another area. Our planned "community" feature, where users can share their discoveries, could be the area we need to push the most. After the user has explored the galatic representation of the internet, they can meet with outher explorers and share, withhold, or barter their discoveries. They can look at what other people have explored, combine it all together, or chose to keep exploring on their own.

Another possibilty for making the game more user-input friendly is to do more in the exploration part. Perhaps by changing it into more of a Warcraft game (for lack of a better example), where the user could gather the "resources" of the planet, and use it to take over other planets, or go against other users. Planets represented by media-rich websites would be literal gold mines for whoever happened across them first. The user could strive to become the richest person in the galaxy, or they could begin a galaxy-wide conquest.

So, the balance between making people want to explore for the sake of exploring, or wanting to explore for the sake of competition, should probably be thought out.

b. Do you agree or disagree with Crosbie's definition, and why?

For the most part, I agree, but I think he may of over-simplified things a bit, or maybe been a bit too stringent on his criteria of what is "media," "medium," and "vehicle."

Yes, land/air/water and one-to-one/many-to-one/many-to-many can be mediums, but I think things such as television, magazines, and newspapers, are a bit too complex to just be "vehicles." Television, for example, can deliver entertainment, information, advertisements, visuals and audio, which can all serve as vehicles for the intent behind them. So while I think he was trying to do a good thing by dumbing New Media down enough to try to make it simple, I really don't think it's going to be as clearly defined as that.

Have a wiki.

Internet Interphase Wiki

Had a meeting today with someone who knows a bit more about internet protocols than Jasper and I do, so of course he turned a lot of our ideas upside down and gave us some new ones. So who knows how much we will end up sticking with in this wiki. But I suppose that's the fun of a project, coming up with ideas and throwing them out.

Well, here I am.

Despite my best efforts to avoid the whole Web 2.0 thing, I seem have to inadvertently fallen into the class that requires me to fling myself into it head first.

Me, I was perfectly happy rattling around in the world outside of people blithely convinced they changed the world with every blog post they made. I browse non-political forums, volunteer details of my life and my opinions when I felt like it, and played in my massively mutliplayer fantasy worlds. The whole web-revolution was amusing to watch from the sidelines, but I never felt any particular need to participate.

But of course, the concept it rages on, and the enthusiasts conscript others into their army of assorted buzzwords. The bloggers and vloggers and whatever other made up words rage against the machine, and try to revolutionize everything but the kitchen sink.

Who knows, maybe they're trying to revolutionize that too.

And of course, everything they set out to do succeeds, which is why Bush has been impeached, net neutrality has been passed, the Iraq war has ended, and large corporations no longer control most of what we view.

Oh, wait.

But, maybe I'm being hasty. Maybe my habit of viewing everything with a nice candy coating of sarcasm has gotten the better of me. So, let's see if this class can prove me wrong.

Also, note to self: make this blog less ugly.