Tuesday, February 15, 2011

6

Important terms

Convergence Culture - Jenkins states that convergence culture is the movement of content across multiple platforms. He uses the example of the "Evil Bert" incident. Basically some kid photoshopped Bert from Sesame Street into pictures with people like Bin Laden and Hitler. The picture of Bert and Osama ended up on anti American posters in the Middle East, and then on CNN. He talks about all of the channels that the photo went through. Bert was on TV, his picture ends up going through photo shop, then back onto the internet, printed in the Middle East, taped by CNN, and broadcast back into American Living rooms. Pretty crazy journey across multiple platforms.

Participatory Culture - We no longer idly consume media, we participate. We provide feedback. We post on Twitter, and those tweets end up on news networks like CNN. We also consume media, and remix and regurgitate it back out in different forms. Websites like YouTube allow us to create our own media, and post feedback on media that others have created.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Blog 4

On page #88 of Everything is Miscellaneous Weinberger states that "every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in another,". For some reason this jumped out at me more than anything else. I think to a certain extent this is definitely true. Take the exercise we did in class for example. When we organized the circles into groups according to overall color, we completely disregarded multiple other categories that the circles could have fallen into. Even when we put all of the circles into a grid with each column representing color and each row representing something else, we were still ignoring certain aspects that needed to be accounted for. This also made me think back on our previous blog posts about how we organize our own things. When I organize my movies by quality, I disorganize them by genre, actor, director, etc.

But is this always true of organization? I'm not so sure. Newegg.com is a good example of this. They have an inventory of thousands of items, and I bet you could find any one particular thing you are looking for. That is because each item is organized into categories. But not just one category, multiple categories. I think that organization only creates disorganization when the organization is over simplified. I like to think of this as 2d organization. Each thing can only fit into one place, which of course creates disorder. However, if each thing is allowed to fit into an unlimited amount of places depending on a multitude of criteria I like to think of it as 3d organization. At least, this is how I visualize it.
Tagging is a great example of this. Let's say I take a photograph of a dog and a cat playing together with a sunset in the background. I may tag it as dog, but someone else will probably come along and also tag it cat. Maybe then a third person will come along and tag it as artsy or something cause of the sunset, who knows. How can adding these tags for every minute detail possibly do anything but help to organize this photo into a database of other photos?