Scary New Media

You know something is seriously changing in a genre when a masked serial killer invites you to check out his “blog”. Such a gesture is obviously a solicitation of interactive engagement — a marketing scheme intended to solicit an investment of attention and to mollify a fan base, with the promise of giving a web-savvy audience member “something extra” for free online. —Michael A. ArnzenScary New Media (Dissections)

A little later in the article, Arnzen offers a good discussion of new media horror as an expression of anxiety over new media itself.

I don’t get cable TV, and it has been so long since I have followed any TV series closely enough to consider this sort of thing. I do remember reading something about a controversy in that the cast of a particular show had agreed to air a certain number of short web-only episodes, but the studio execs refused to pay them extra for their work, so the episodes stopped.

As I understand it, YouTube has recently limited its clip lengths to 10 minutes, which is slightly longer than the average content hole in between the commercial breaks, and about the same length as the amount of film that the old movie cameras could shoot in one stretch.

This is getting off topic, but I’ll push on anyway.

Just today, Steve Jobs announced that he was changing the name of Apple Computers to Apple Inc, and he unveiled a new iPhone and a TV appliance that is supposed to sync your video files across your various video appliances. Some observers are predicting that the iPod is pretty much dead, but the new iPhone also looks pretty expensive, to those who don’t have executive epxense accounts to finance their toy purchases. At any rate, you can bet that we’re going to see a lot of hype for hand-held video. Way back in the dark ages, families used to gather in the living room to watch the same shows. Once you had cable TV, more channels meant it was likely that different family members would watch different things.

Occasionally when our DVD player has been out, I have offered to watch a movie with my wife on my laptop computer, but she rejected the idea. To her, a computer is something you use when you are working. I don’t really watch many DVDs on my computer, but I do from time to time. And I’m fortunate enough that I have a job where I can tell myself that watching Blade Runner or playing an IF game is research, which it is.

I’m still more likely to want to build a Half-Life 2 level or program an IF game for relaxation if I can find a few unbroken hours to block out for such activities. (Blogging is typically what I do when I know I’m going to be interrupted, or when I’m too sick to concentrate, which has been the case for the past week.)

7 thoughts on “Scary New Media

  1. Thanks for posting this. And I'm happy to see that the responses are all about 'sickness' too! (I think Mike Rubino was suggesting you kick back with some good DVDs (like Blade Runner) when feeling too ill to concentrate — good advice!).
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    <br/>The article itself addresses the "carnival dart games" of many "new media tie-ins" and I hope visitors find it pertinent to their thinking about the relationship between traditional and print publishing in the entertainment sector.

  2. "Way back in the dark ages, families used to gather in the living room to watch the same shows. Once you had cable TV, more channels meant it was likely that different family members would watch different things."
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    <br/>Boy, is that the truth! I never had cable TV. In fact, I rarely watched TV in the first place. Choice does not necessarily equal freedom. Today, we fall captive to the vast array of meaningless oddities (and patent-restricted oddities) that pervade our social space.
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    <br/>I think that, if anything, the most uncanny and horrific part of new media is either the claustraphobia it causes or the agoraphobia it causes. I think we get so comfortable with consumerism (ie: people shoving enticing things in our face and being constantly manipulated by visual space) we tend to forget how confined we really are when the only freedom we have is to make a limited set of choices.
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    <br/>PS: I'm crossing my fingers because I wasn't able to get my flu shot this year… Yikes!

  3. Wow, elsewhere Mike said he was sick, too. I haven’t been out and about enough to know how prevalent it is. Maybe everyone who’s sick is fooling around on the blogosphere waiting to die. (Sorry… I actually feel slightly better now, and my wife is going to send me to see Seussical with the kids tonight since at the moment I’m the healthier of the two of us. The kids have both already been sick, fortunately for them.)

  4. My dad just told me last night about the new iPhone. He said one version was $500 and there is a $600 version as well.
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    <br/>Hand-held video. I suppose because I have no desire to have it, then I don't see what the big hype is. Just another hazard when driving, I say.
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    <br/>"I'm sorry officer I was watching Kramer insult his audience on YouTube…was I really driving into oncoming traffic?"
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    <br/>Don't get me wrong, I think it's neat and all. I'm so sorry to hear you are sick, and I can sympathize. I went to the hospital at 2 in the morning on Saturday- I honestly thought I was dying. The doctor said I was one of four people there with the flu!

  5. Sometimes I like to tell myself that watching Bladerunner is more beneficial than doing homework… but it doesn’t usually end well. (The homework, that is. Bladerunner always seems to end well, assuming you’re watching the Director’s Cut)

  6. I'm glad to hear about your recovery. When I got up this morning I felt fractionally better, but now my wife has come down with it, and she was completely wiped out, so there's no more lying around in bed for me.
    <br/>
    <br/>It was frustrating having all this free time, but not having the capacity to concentrate for any length of time. Look at how rambling this blog entry was!
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    <br/>Fortunately I was pretty far along in planning for my classes, so if I can recover this weekend I'll be able to rush through final prep and I'll be fine.
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    <br/>You article and two student independent study papers are all neatly stacked in my to-do list.

  7. Dennis: I'm sorry to hear that you are suffering from a virus. I had a flu virus with a cough. It started in December and is just winding down now. The Steve Jobs announcement was spectacular for its implications for mobile computing. Devices that sync voice, video, text files (phone and TV). I don't have cable TV either, but I do watch movies on my laptop. Hope to hear from you when you get better on my article. I read your blogs on how your students are blogging less in class and using other communicative apps. If you think about it, the new devices are really syncing culture and biology: multimodal literacies through which we fashion reality (along the lines TIME Magazine person of year concept). In a literature class, there is an additional textual interface.
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