Becoming Screen Literate: video editing, mashups, and image creation

Thanks to Brett for sending along the link to this NY Times article about how screen culture has evolved. "Becoming Screen Literate" discusses the ease and prevalence of video editing tools, their link to textual literacy, and how this is playing out in popular culture.

Among other things, the article discusses mashups, (for those unfamiliar with mashups- check one out here and read about them on Wikipedia) explaining that, "the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases."

Editing video and sound from various sources to create a new whole with its own separate meaning strikes me as not unlike an enhanced podcast that borrows music and images from various sources and uses them to make meaning in conjunction with an original audio text. Better yet, if you're not fully satisfied with the images you find on the Web, you can alter and mash them up using photoshop to better suit your podcast.

According to the Times article, this image mashing "is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images."

For Tuesday: Considering Images in an Enhanced Podcast

You've got some viewing to do. As you watch and listen to the following NY Times audio slideshows (also known as enhanced podcasts), pay attention to what pictures appear when, for how long, and how they interact with the text and sound.

For your viewing pleasure:
The Urban Taxidermist
The Baby Deliverer
A Sense of History

Ira Glass on Storytelling parts 1, 2, 3 and 4

Image Collections:

NY Public Library

Library of Congress

Bring images to class to insert into your podcast. (Consider using the image collections whose links are in the resources folder on Ctools.) Lauren Atkins will be on hand to answer tech questions.

More on the death of print journalism and Twitter as mindcasting

NYU Journalism Professor and New Media Analyst Jay Rosen gathers and summarizes all the big articles published this month on the future of journalism in "Rosen's Flying Seminar In the Future of News."

And there's another new media term for us to throw around--mindcasting. Apparently, Twitter has uses beyond digital narcissism. Good to hear. According to Rosen, Twitter "is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens." Read the rest of the LA Times article/blog post here.

Musical Classrooms - class on Thursday 3/26

On Thursday, we'll meet in classroom 3010 in the School of Education. For a map of where that building is located, click here: http://www.umich.edu/~sites/info/seb/

Please allow plenty of time to find the room so we can start promptly at 2:40. We'll be talking about the use of sound and music in podcasts, and then you'll have time to work on your own project, apply what you learned Tuesday, and have your questions answered by me and my highly skilled technical assistants Rob and Ian.

Bring headphones.

The Digital Divide: Stark Contrast

In the course of 24 hours, these two stories were sent to me. They poignantly represent the digital divide.

The Liberian Analog Blogger has the ideas and desire to bring new media to his community but lacks adequate resources to do so. Thanks to BJ for the link. (image from AfriGadget)




These Colorado kindergartners have new media resources to help them learn to read at the tender age of five.













(image from The Citizen Telegram)

New Media Picks of the Week: More From the World of Sound

Blog Post #8 due on Thursday and bring music and sound files to work with in Garageband.

Podcasts to listen to and write on for Thursday:

Scared

The Kiss and the Dying- click the third image on the right in the top row

Lost in Translation (see ITunes U on Ctools)

For class, consider how the use of sound and music creates image, set mood, underscore story, and help organize the narrative. Pay attention to when the sound and music comes in and at what level, as well as when there is only voice playing on the audio track. And do the sound and music serve other purposes in the podcasts?


Other Optional Listening:

Theory of Everything: Cell Phones. This piece falls easily into the category of the project on which you're working. Interesting discussion of people's behavior when using cell phones.

Third Coast International Audio Festival. Podcasts from Chicago Public Radio's audio festival that are chosen from a broad field of submissions.

More Jonathan Goldstein. If his segment of the This American Life episode "Plan B" about the telemarketer captured your imagination, check out his myspace page: Wiretap. It's comedy. The Fed and Barney segment is especially hilarious. Goldstein uses phone conversations and sounds associated with phones to create audio narratives. The concept is simple yet effective, and the humor is dark. And we get to eavesdrop on the dialogue.

B-Side Radio Tamara Keith creates podcasts about her neighbors and other aspects of daily life.

Didn't Ask to Be Born

This episode of This American Life, especially act one, is worth a listen. Some great images, characters, reflection, and progression through time. A wrenching story without being melodramatic. Click here to listen.

Making a Podcast: Cringing at Your Own Voice

I am getting used to hearing my own voice. Strange, I know. I hear myself every day. But not through headphones. I don't scrutinize my pitch and inflection. I just use my voice to communicate. Once it's been recorded and is playing back to me via Quicktime, I can analyze just how nasal and oddly casual this voice, my voice, sounds. I have to face it. I don't sound remotely like Terry Gross. Is this what I sound like to everyone? Horrors.

Hopefully we only sound foreign and awful to ourselves. My theory is that the awfulness, the cringe factor of hearing your own voice, isn't about the actual quality of your voice. It's about the self-consciousness--that when we replay a voicemail or a sound file of ourselves it creates a disjuncture between past and present, consciousness and body. A version of ourselves from the past is talking to our current self in the present. We are hearing from ourselves outside of our own head. This is not normal.

I'll get over the disgust at the sound of my own voice. I have to for the podcast. I'm already growing mildly fond of the casualitis that marks my voice as I re-listen to my audio files. As I edit, I'll hear my voice for hours at a time. I'll slice it and dice it to achieve my desired effect. Maybe by the end of the process, I'll even adore the sound of my own voice. I'll be a voice narcissist. Maybe Terry Gross will begin to dream of sounding just like me. Maybe Ira Glass will be saying, "Hey, can we get that Delia DeCourcy on the show? Doesn't matter what the segment is. We just have to have that voice."

Lobsters and Journalistic Blogs

In her talk The Blogosphere: the Future of Journalism?, Fara Warner discussed the inevitability of blogging as the future of journalism. Web 2.0 is here to stay, and journalists and newspapers must find a way to make it work to their and their readers' advantage. But the business of journalism is crumbling. New business models are needed. Warner pointed to spot.us as an example of community funded journalism in which the people pay for the stories they want investigated and reported on. But what about the more pressing stories that can't wait for funding? What about the daily news? While I agree with Warner that the future of journalism is inevitably in the blogosphere, and there are some great benefits to that (see sites like scoop44 and palestra), what I wonder about most is the effect of decentralized reporting on the reader.

The same evening I heard Warner's talk, I read a New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace, the visionary American writer who ended his life in September. The tornado of Wallace's mind is apparent in his fiction and was no doubt hard to live with as his suicide confirmed. It seems Wallace experienced the world as a constant onslaught of sensory information and ideas. And this is how I feel about the Internet--specifically the news media on the Web. While Wallace was able to make meaning and even great fiction from the onslaught, I don't possess his genius. The mass of information on the Web and its ready availability is unlike anything society has experienced before. There are so many sources all reaching for our attention, sources that may or may not be accurate. Warner asked if her multi-media reporting was journalism and answered her own question with--the audience gets to decide. Which leads me to the question of media literacy. Will journalistic blogging produce smarter, more critical readers who possess or develop the skills to determine what is and isn't journalism? Perhaps. Maybe the question is moot. The people who read critically are the ones who would've anyway without the advent of journalistic blogging. And the readers who don't question the truthiness of what they read on the Internet don't question the validity of the reporting on Fox News either.

Foster-Wallace's remarks at Kenyon College's 2005 graduation ceremony seem applicable here. He told the audience that true freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” I have to wonder if blogging as the new form of journalism will leave us totally hosed as a society or in a better place? How good is America at choosing what to pay attention to? On the whole, we seem to pay attention to messages that are broadcast the most loudly and frequently. How truly free are we, according to Foster Wallace's definition, when we experience the narcotic effect of the blogosphere? And how do I avoid the drug-like state I experience after reading several blogs and news-media sites? After bouts of news surfing, I know I look like someone who has had a labotomy. I get sucked in and absorbed by the words on the screen. I click from a CNN story on a Brazilian supermodel who lost her limbs to a report on the Huffington Post about Obama's speech on health care to a local report on police violence. How critical am I of online journalism when I'm surfing headlines and first paragraphs?

I appreciate the immediacy of online news and the ready availability of almost anything on the Web. At the end of my daily Internet media tear, I thought of Foster-Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster," which had come up during class discussion about Eammon Grennan's poem "Incident." I could Goggle the essay and read it from start to finish--the kind of prolonged, focused reading I prefer that doesn't involve hyperlinks or flashing advertisements. Perhaps my issue with journalism in the blogosphere isn't the amount of information out there, but the way in which I read it. And I can't entirely blame bloggers for my peripatetic reading habits.

Blogging Update

As discussed in class, there will be no formal blog prompts for the remainder of the semester, only posting deadlines and general topics to discuss. Posts should concern the ideas we're dealing with in class. We have done away with work groups, meaning you can reply to anyone's blog, but must make 2 comments within 48 hours of the post. Of course, feel free to respond to more than two of your peers' blogs.

For Tuesday, listen to "Plan B" on I Tunes U and analyze the structure (of the individual segments and the entire episode), language, sound, pacing, music, and implied argument of the show.

Langston Hughes Multimedia Jazz Event

I direct you to Darius' blog where he highlights an interesting multi-media jazz event: The Langston Hughes Project. (You'll recall Hughes was the author of the text for Sweet Flypaper of Life.) Tomorrow. 6pm. Michigan Union Ballroom. Check it out. For more detailed info about the project, click here, and watch a video by the project's music director.

The Digital Divide down south

"Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road" is a video exploration of the digital divide in rural North Carolina, featured on InternetforEveryone's site. The link between Internet access and economic growth/vitality is evident from these interviews, and yet some of these folks couldn't even afford to pay for high speed Internet if it was available.

Not only is it striking to me that people living near my former home of Durham can't get high speed Internet access (or any access at all), but that my own parents were in the same situation just a year ago. The only provider in their rural Virginia county supplied dial up service that was inconsistent at best. About a year ago, a massive cell tower was built in their mountain valley (an eyesore but at last I could get a cell signal when I visited) and my mother bought herself an air card, which uses a cell phone signal to provide access. Prior to that development, I had to drive the ten miles to town to do any work that required a high speed connection--not a big deal when you're on vacation. But it's not a viable scenario long term.

So if such a lack of Internet access exists in wealthy America, how significant is this lack in countries like China and Brazil, nations that have bustling urban metropolises and vast rural regions? And what does this lack of access look like for people in poor urban areas, where high-speed Internet might be available but not an economic possibility. Who will pay to bridge the digital divide? Is it a government's responsibility?

UM Lecture on Blogging - Extra Credit

On Wednesday, March 11 at 6pm, Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism Fara Warner will deliver a lecture, "The Blogosphere: The Future of Journalism?" Location--the Hussey Room in the Michigan League. If you attend the lecture and write a substantive blog post about it, you will receive extra credit.

New Media Picks of the Week - The Kindle 2

I've been away from the new media maelstrom for a week and in that time, the Kindle 2 was introduced. This NY Times article about it lists all the wonderful features of the Kindle 2 and even made me interested in purchasing one--though I'm such a lover of the traditional book that such a purchase would feel like blasphemy. When I first heard about the Kindle, I immediately wondered about the death of the book, which according to many has been dying a slow death for years. But in actuality, the Kindle has the potential to help the book, albeit in e-form. But so what? Well, according to writer Roy Blount, Jr. in his NY Times op-ed piece "The Kindle Swindle," the Kindle is gypping writers out of their well-deserved audio rights. The Kindle can read books to its owner. With a CD audio book, the writer gets paid for that iteration of his/her work. Not so with the Kindle 2. This is problematic, but I'm choosing to see the growing popularity of the Kindle in a positive light. After all, as the NY Times article points out "in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences." I'm inclined to agree with this assertion.

And as Dave Slusher points out in his blog Evil Genius Chronicles, Kindle reading is for books we don't want hard copies of. "I will not cease to buy paper copies of books, I’ll just refine the choices to the ones I know I want to keep continuing to own for a long time." The Kindle makes readers more deliberate in their choice of whether to read an electronic text or a hard copy text. Nothing wrong with that. The question then becomes for me, should I ever invest in a Kindle: what books would I read electronically? I can highlight and underline with a Kindle. So would I do my academic reading electronically but still curl up on the couch with a hard copy novel? Or am I so married to the pen and my love of scrawling marginalia that I would stick to hard copies for in-depth reading and leave my pleasure reading to the Kindle? Guess I'll have to experiment to figure out which form of reading is best accomplished with this adaptation of the book.

New Media Picks of the Week

"The Conversion" is a viral video produced by and starring our own Rob Magnesen. Let's help his video live up to its viral title. Give it a viewing--it's quite funny.

"Do We Need a New Internet" is a NY Times article about the future and (in)security of the Internet that I know some of you will find interesting. To be rather apocalyptic, we're much closer to the brink of a technological breakdown than I realized. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

"How to Make Sentences Clear and Concise" No, it's not especially new media, but this website does have some direct and simple suggestions for how to make your writing better, an important subject given your current project.

images by Guy Hoffman from The New York Times

Other people are typographically obsessed too

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who notices and ponders font choices.

Read about New Yorkers griping about subway fonts here.

See beautiful and amazing typefaces by Bodie and Fou here.

New Media Picks of the Week

This week we're focused on design issues including layout, color and typeface. How can text act as an image and influence the visual effect of any document? How does the arrangement of images on the page determine where the reader's eye lands? How does color influence a reader's experience of your content? Check out the links below as you consider these questions.

Typeface: the way the message is dressed

At The Visual Dictionary, you can explore words as pictures in the world.

This clip from the documentary Helvetica looks at the effect typeface has on us as readers and consumers.

In another clip from Helvetica. Designer Wim Crouwel takes about the purpose of typeface.

What font are you? Take this highly accurate quiz posted on the PBS website about the documentary Helvetica.


Color: more meaning than you think

Blog Solid (of interest to you hardcore bloggers) uses earth tones to connote their solidity. The tan on brown contrast is easy to read.

Sometimes less color is more visually effective. The black and white approach with hints of color that Diesel Jeans uses makes for a clean, eye- catching homepage.

This landscape company selected colors that pop and are slick, while also selecting hues that people associate with earth and water.


Layout: directing the gaze

Large type in the middle of the page can be an effective attention getter. It's quite clear who will be presenting at dConstruct, a conference on designing the social web.

Simplicity means focus as this director/cinematographer's website shows on his personal website.

This web designer uses a one page/ two column navigational approach. Not ideal for those of us who don't like to scroll, but easy for the eye to understand.

images from: Visualdictionary.net
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mmcadams/colorpages/images/color_wheel_full.gif
http://donhowardproductions.com/eye.JPG

Websites - the modern equivalent of the record?

As I consider the place of the web design project within the frame of this course, I can't help wondering whether writing and designing web pages is truly a new media act? If the word "new" is contextual and audience dependent when used in conjunction with the word "media," then web design isn't especially new. The members of the class have grown up with the Internet. Reading a web page is as normal to you as reading a book and is probably something you do with more frequency and ease than hard cover text reading. With that in mind, I revisited the various definitions of new media that we discussed in week two and began thinking more about the role of interactivity and multimedia in web pages. Are these the elements that make a website a new media text? According to my first Powerpoint presentation:


"Current new media texts draw attention to their materiality by mixing media (sound, image, video) and/or making the reader/viewer consider the materiality of the form as they read/experience. This seems directly linked to interactivity--the reader/viewer makes choices to navigate through the text and thus plays a role in constructing content."

So does the reader's role in determining his/her reading experience through self-navigation make a website a new media text? Please weigh in on these questions and let us know what will firmly place your website in the new media category.

New Media Picks of the Week - Poor Website Navigation

Today I discovered that there's a term for poor site navigation. According to Wikipedia:

Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined and popularized by author, web designer, and usability analyst Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces (especially in websites) in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are. The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them.

This post is dedicated to providing examples of MMN. Here's what not to do on your website.

The Connext Project wants us to "see the music," but it's difficult to discern where we'll see it and what music we'll see because of the site design. The grid of links on the homepage also makes us think there's alot more content on the site than there actually is.

I'm assuming Leo Burnett is an advertising agency, though it's not entirely clear from their site, which uses Flash! Flash can be very visually exciting for the user/view, but on this site, the use of Flash interferes with clear and effective site navigation. And ironically, the tab at the bottom of the page that reads "Feeling Lost" provides a menu when you hover the mouse over it, though that menu disappears if you try to click on any of the items listed.

Texelate is the web site of a web designer, which I found surprising. The issue on this site is the number of menus. There's one at the top of the homepage, another on the right margin for the site's Blog and additional links in the center of the page. Admittedly, I prefer a left hand nav bar, probably because I'm left-handed. Regardless, the format and design of the homepage also made it difficult for me to decide where to start and what to read and to even clearly determine what serves this guy offered.

Blog Post #5: Best and Worst of the Web

This post will be due in a week (Tues., 2/10). For post #5, you will select two websites. One will be an example of stellar content, web architecture, and design and the other will be a poor example of the same three areas. Your post should analyze how content, architecture, and design are working (or are decidedly dysfunctional) in each site. You may choose to compare the sites you've chosen or write about them quite separately. Up to you. Specific details will be important to back up your analysis and to entice your blog readers to actually go check out these sites. I'm hoping to be thrilled by your best picks and disgusted by your worsts.

Image from: http://xpress101.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/my-hand.jpg