Media: April 2004 Archive Page

An online survey of 2,755 musicians and songwriters shows they are quite divided in their opinions about the impact of music file sharing by Internet users. There is no clear consensus regarding the effects of online file-sharing on artists.

Some 35% of this sample agree with the statement that file-sharing services are not bad for artists because they help promote and distribute an artist'swork; 23% agree with the statement that file-sharing services are bad for artists because they allow people to copy an artist'swork without permission or payment. And 35% of those surveyed agree with both statements. --Preliminary results of survey of musicians (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Interesting context for my blog on Braunbeck's "Of Awards, A**holes, and Assorted Aggravations."

As always with Pew, the full document is in PDF (boo!).

Discuss William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. In-class activity: find a partner. Inspect what he or she is wearing or carrying, and write down every brand name you can spot. We will collate the results and vote on what is, or isn't "cool."

Brand Name	Cool rating?
VICTORIA SECRET	14+
Advil	14
Hanes	13
Adidas	12
Smackers	12
Eclipse	11
Twix	11
Blistex	11
Bath & Body	11
nike	10
Old Navy	10
Wal Mart	10
Bic	9
Listerine	9
Nickelodian	9
Orbits	9
SHU	9
Visa	9
Skechers	9
Big Red	8
Express	8
Giant Eagle Ad Car	8
Jansport	8
Juicy Fruit	8
Maybelline	8
Panasonic	8
roxy	8
Steve Madden	8
Verizon	8
Kohls	8
American Eagle	7
CoverGirl	7
Dino's	7
ETNIES	7
Extra	7
FOSSIL	7
MUDD	7
Nine West	7
Aquafina	6
Lerner	6
Ralph Lauren	6
Relic	6
Trident	6
Wrigleys	6
Extra	6
Altoids	5
Emily the strange	5
No Boundaries	5
BASIC	4
Paper Mate	4
PB	4
TIMBERLAND	4
Kay Jewelers	4
Aeropostale	3
Fashion Bug	3
George	3
Hillfiger	3
HURLEY	3
Jerzee	3
National City	3
Nokia	3
Tachikara	3
Tilt	3
Vaseline	3
Bad cat	2
clairs	2
J. JILL	2
Jeffrey Bean	2
Nextel	2
ROSE ART	2
Kyocera	2
Legend	2
K-mart	2
EB TEK	1
License	1
Micron	1
Northwest Territory	1
OPI	1
Pilot	1
Swerve	1
ULTRA BLEND	1
Unisoly	1
Virgin mobile	1
Athletic Works	0
Atlantic	0
Jerz	0
C.E. George	0
Canyon River Blues	0
East Port	0
Ed White Basics	0
Jostens	0
Modern Book	0
Motorola	0
Shop n Save	0
Uniball	0
wccc	0
Maxell	0
Cartier	-1

Cool Hunting at Seton Hill UniversityJerz's Literacy Weblog)

In the final weeks of term, it's not surprising that a headache pain reliever rates so highly. I was surprised at how highly various brands of gum and other oral products rated. Victoria's Secret actually got cheers, with some people, both men and women, putting up both hands. Hanes seems, by contrast, very boring to me, but hey, it's underwear, so I guess that was good enough for this class.

A Tree-Mail 'Thank You'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Sometimes, even for a cyber-guy like me, an old-fashioned, hand-crafted "Thank You" note just makes it all worthwhile. From my former student Kirsten Schubert, who really knows how to make a fellow feel appreciated.

You're very welcome, Kirsten!

This admission is privately echoed by top players at magazines owned by major publishers, who sometimes cite more lax ad/edit divisions at European magazines as a catalyst. But a jacket showing up in a fashion layout doesn't equal, say, a series of paid-for Cadillac references showing up in a short story that doesn't have the words "special advertising section" topping it, nor a long account of a mountaineering expedition studded with mentions and visuals of the adventurers chowing down on Power Bars. --Jon Fine --Marketers Press for Product Placement in Magazine Text (Ad Age)

I blogged this as yet another example (see also "Faking It: Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines") to show my students for why they should be extremely critical of anything that they read.

While humans are still going to be biased and imperfect no matter the venue, academic articles are supposed to be free from this kind of manipulation, thanks to the peer review process.

Via M. L. O'Brien.

The Project's national phone survey of 1,371 adult Internet users conducted between February 3 and March 1, 2004 shows that 14% of online Americans say that at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they no longer do any downloading. That represents more than 17 million people. However, the number of people who say they download music files increased from an estimated 18 million to 23 million since the Project's November-December 2003 survey. This increase is likely due to the combined effects of many people adopting new, paid download services and, in some cases, switching to lower-profile peer-to-peer file sharing applications. --The State of Music Downloading and File-Sharing Online (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

The full article is in PDF.

What do films like Independence Day, Armageddon and X-Men have in common? The answer is that apart from costing millions of dollars to make, they all feature in a new course called Physics in Films that is being taught to students at the University of Central Florida. Costas Efthimiou, the mathematical physicist who teaches the course, believes that non-science students learn more about the fundamentals of physics by studying films and science fiction than they do from more traditional approaches. --Physics Goes to Hollywood (PhysicsWeb)

Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads.

"This is what happens when the game's off, basically," said Mike `Burnie' Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue's creators. "They're chatting away, spending their idle time like the rest of us do, just passing the day away."

And so they do -- gossiping, arguing, strategizing and generally wondering what the heck they're doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, fighting blue guys or red guys for no apparent reason. The comedy, absurdist, military, and oddly bureaucratic, was compared by one critic to the plays of Samuel Beckett. --Spielbergs with a joystick (Toronto Star)

Tonight I'll be discussing LPattern Recognition with my literature class... that book centers around the underground cult phenomenon of a strange film being released on the Internet as anonymous clips.

This article also includes a reference to "My Trip to Liberty City," by new media artist Jim Munroe.

To viewers, the hourly show appears as one continuous, somewhat overwhelming four-block-long image -- and it's programmed that way by teams of animators who spend as much as four months to create the shows. But what viewers won't be able to see is that the image -- and the "screen" -- is broken down into eight sections, each managed by a separate computer responsible for displaying its portion of the image in sync with the others. --Steve Freiss --Downtown Vegas Sees Big Picture  (Wired)

We're discussing Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age in "Intro to Literary Studies," so this discussion of real-world "mediatronics" seemed blogworthy.

Rural users lag in broadband adoption, and infrastructure availability is a reason for this. Here are some highlights from the Pew Internet Project’s February 2004 survey:

• 55% of all adult Internet users – or 34% of all adult Americans – have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job.
• 39% of adult Internet users – or 24% of all adult Americans – have high-speed access at home, an increase of 60% since March 2003.
• A surge in subscription to DSL high-speed Internet connections, which has more than doubled since March 2003, is largely behind the growth in broadband at home.
• DSL now has a 42% share of the home broadband market, up from 28% in March 2003.
• For the first time, more than half (52%) of a key demographic group – college educated people age 35 and younger – has broadband connections at home.
• Only 10% of rural Americans go online from home with high-speed connections, about one-third the rate for non-rural Americans.

--Broadband Penetration on the Upswing (Pew Internet Trust)

I hadn't realized how popular high-speed home connections are.

The full report is available as a PDF.

There is still the childhood picture just where it'salways been, right above "I was born Justin Allyn Hall in Chicago at 12:01pm on December 16, 1974." And there in the heart of the page is still the one-line paragraph that first woke me out of my early Web-surfing coma: "When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this." The minute I read that I knew this was not going to be your typical mid-90s nerdobiography. And eight-and-a-half million gut-spilling Web-autobiographies later, it still holds up. --Rob Wittig reviews Justin's links. --Justin Hall and the Birth of the 'Blogs (http://www.electronicbookreview.com)

Via Jill/txt.

An increasing number of us seem interested in learning political news only from media that tell us what we want to hear.

That's dangerous for the press and the people. What should be done? --Unvarnished Truth?: Perception of bias undermines media (Dallas Morning News)

There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging -- but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the way of a democratic and public activity. It follows from this view that the Internet in general, and Weblogging in particular, are conscious answers to these challenges. Nico Macdonald --The future of Weblogging (The Register)

Testing my new RSS feed

I am having some trouble coding up my new RSS feed. If you've got a content aggregator, and you'd like to let me know how my feed works for you, please let me know.

BTW... What's a content aggregator?

Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator of their progress. The earliest uses of weblogs thus far have been as replacements for writing journals. Despite difficulties, there are several advantages to the use of weblogs in this setting, especially in that they provide a more immediate and social environment for writing (Kajder & Bull, 2003), which when combined with the improvements to student writing that seem to accrue simply by moving to a computerized form of journals (Goldberg, Russel, & Cook, 2004), represents an obvious area for experimentation.

There has been a move over the last decade toward using portfolios of student materials to improve evaluation and learning. --Alex Halavais --Weblogs as 'replacement' educational technology (Alex Halavais)

Friday afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting through a number of final presentations from graduating English majors. My colleague Mike Arnzen blogged about the online portfolios that some students chose to produce instead of traditional 3-ring binders.

While praising the information management and convenience of the online portfolios, Arnzen also noted a few downsides -- one of which was the fact that an e-portfolio is geared towards serving up the final product, rather than presenting a coherent reflection on progress.

But my freshmen who have been blogging almost since the first week of school will have a tremendous archive of material to consult when they are seniors. Those students who choose to submit electronic portfolios will probably be the ones who have taken plenty of new media journalism courses (and if I'm the instructor, I imagine they'll be blogging). To compensate for the weaknesses of the online portfolio genre, and to help students take fuller advantage of the strengths of the online medium, perhaps we need to rethink the reflective introduction assignment, which currently assumes that the student will write an ordinary prose essay. For those students who choose to submit an online portfolio, perhaps that introductory essay needs to be rethought as a series of individual blog entries, which themselves contain links back to important blog entries from the past. Thus, instead of clicking on items in a table of contents, the evaluation of an online portfolio will be like reading a hyperlinked narrative, written with the full knowledge that the very nature of the WWW means that the reader of an online portfolio will be reading the same way he or she reads any online text -- looking for bold keywords, bulleted lists, subject headings, and links, and slowing down to read in more detail only when the text is particularly interesting.

Link found via KiarosNews.

It's been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods's pioneering computer game Adventure and its descendants are finally beginning to garner the critical recognition they deserve. At only 286 pages, Twisty Little Passages is a small, accessible book that addresses a deep and complex subject. The author's stated intention is to bring us the first book-length consideration of interactive fiction (IF) as a legitimate literary field, and he has certainly succeeded. --John Miles --Twisty Little Passages [Review] (Slashdot Books)

A long overdue Grand Finale to the celebrated 'Peanuts' cartoon strip. By Raymond J. Dartsch. With apologies to Schulz. --Rest in Peace, Charlie Brown

Really horrible. I mean it. Sick, sick, sick.

I couldn't stop clicking.

The artwork is decent, but the lettering is hard to read... I hadn't realized just how much Shultz's wobbly lines characterizied the words in Peanuts. And dealing with Snoopy so quickly -- especially in such an obvious, offensive way -- was a mistake. Dartsch should have saved that for later.

Having said all that, Dartsch really does seem to understand Charlie Brown's character.

Researchers are finding players can make sharper soldiers, drivers and surgeons. Their reaction time is better, their peripheral vision more acute. They are taking risks, finding themselves at ease in a demanding environment that requires paying attention on several levels at once.

While there are countless examples of children vegetating in front of the box, real learning is going on as well. Children who go online to play the World War II shooter fantasy Medal of Honor Allied Assault might last all of 14 seconds if they just hit the Normandy beaches with guns blazing. To succeed, they must come up with a plan - either by typing messages or talking through headphones to teammates whom they may never have met. --Daniel Rubin --Ahead of the game? (Philly.com)

This reporter still equates videogames with juvenile behavior -- the "cute" conclusion equates studying videogames with never having to grow up. Other than that, this is a good article, which very quickly moves beyond soccer-mom fears about computer games.

Much of the Blogosphere's current claim to fame, of course, has to do with its outward criticism of already established individuals and institutions. Blogs have been responsible for keeping Big Media on its toes and correcting common errors, misjudgments and mischaracterizations that have been spread by Big Media regarding various important stories and issues. Blogs have also been responsible for taking on powerful individuals for their errors of judgment. The crucial role blogs played in causing former Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott to step down from his position after making comments that were perceived as racially insensitive and nostalgic for a time in which bigotry towards African-Americans was the order of the day remains notable for all those who have kept close tabs on the development of the Blogosphere. --Pejman Yousefzadeh --The Blogosphere: All Grown Up Now (Tech Central Station)

A great link from KairosNews.

You may feel excitement or dread -- or a combination of the two -- if you have been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It's a tall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you're likely to wish you had at least three semesters in which to cover everything. --Mindy McAdams --Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course (Online Journalism Review)

I won't teach the "Newswriting" course again until Fall 2005, but I will be teaching a new one-credit "Media Lab" course that will be for those students who want academic credit for working on the student paper. Our first job will be beefing up the website for The Setonian Online, which at the moment is essentially an archive of our print content, poured in to an HTML template. We can do better than that, though, if I can manage to tap into the enthusiasm and talent my students have so far shown. This should be exciting.

The logic of the remix has made its way into consumer culture - we know that. But what we haven't yet identified is how to integrate that logic into the university (what I wrote about in my ctheory article). It took hundreds of years before the university completely adopted the logic of print as an organizing principle, and only in the late 1800s did the composition program evolve out of this logic. We can imagine assignments and pedagogy based on the remix ("adding a different and unique spin" to previously constructed arguments, writings, images, etc.). But what about the entire composition curriculum? How would a remix composition program function? What would it look like? How would students become remixologists instead of "precise" and "identifiable" figures (products of topic sentences and linear argument)? -Jeff Rice --Sprite Remix (Yellow Dog)

Check out this news item from Userland CEO Scott Young who started getting calls from Chris Allbritton's NYU students yesterday who were doing a story on blog software companies... --Student Journalists Outed Via Weblog (Weblogg-ed)

One more hazard of edublogging to worry about!

--After some discussion all the outstanding issues in game studies had been settled. (Barry Atkins | Yahoo! Photos)

A great collection of cartoons... I do wish the captions were searchable. This one about a deep space anomaly is also good.

Atkins is the video game scholar whose talk at the Princeton video game conference, amplified by weblog reports (including mine) and further amplified by readers commenting on those weblog reports, touched off some fireworks in the "narratology vs. ludology" debate. (That is, are computer games best understood as kinds of stories, or as a complex set of rules that may or may not include story-like attributes?)

Via buzzcut.

Writers have always used the net to distribute novels and poems that could appear in print. But there's a tradition of experimenting with online forms such as email and chatrooms to tell stories that could only work online. Writers are taking this further by working with blogs. Indeed, with their short daily entries, reader feedback and links to the net, blogs seem purpose-built for creating episodic stories. Jim McClellan --How to write a blog-buster  (Guardian)

This article quotes Jim Munroe, a Canadian new media artist whose work I enjoy immensely. (He made the short film ">interactive," and just the other day I enjoyed watching his narration of scenes from Grand Theft Auto III, "My Trip to Liberty City".)

Infocom is long gone, but never mind. The original Infocom games are available for download at www.latz.org, and also for free play through AIM. A Web programmer named Andrew Baio has written an "AIM bot" that makes it possible.

Bots are simple programs that act like a human being who's subscribed to an instant messaging program. Hundreds of such bots have been written; America Online, for instance has its Safety Bot, which tells Internet users how to protect their privacy. Any AIM user can try it by adding AOLSafetyBot to his buddy list.

You can play some of the old text-based games in the same way. Just install one of Baio's bots, named InfocomBot, InfocomBot2, or InfocomBot3. Send a greeting to your new "buddy," then pick from one of several Infocom classics. Not sure what to do next? Visit brasslantern.org, where you'll find a beginner's guide to text-based gaming. It's all free, and you don't even need a buddy. --Hiawatha Bray --With IMs, friends can be foes (Boston Globe)

Bray did a great job on this piece. Great to see not only the Old Skool games mentioned in the mainsream press, but brasslantern.org -- a great resource by Stephen Grenade, a tireless promoter of current events in the IF world.

Via GoogleNews (where I've set up a bot to send me an e-mail when a new article shows up with the words "interactive fiction").

The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files. Middle-class students raised in a high-tech, service-sector economy are several generations removed from the manual labor of factories or farms.

The saga of the discovery of the cave paintings can also show students how history is written and revised. The first cave found, at Altamira in northern Spain, was stumbled on by a hunter and his dog in 1868. The aristocratic estate owner, an amateur archaeologist, surveyed the cave but did not see the animals painted on the ceiling until, on a visit in 1879, his five-year-old daughter looked up and exclaimed at them. Controversy over dating of the paintings was prolonged: critics furiously rejected the hypothesis of their prehistoric origin and attributed them to forgers or Roman-era Celts. The discoveries of other cave paintings in Spain and the Dordogne from the 1890s on were also met with skepticism by the academic establishment. Funding for the early expeditions had to come from Prince Albert of Monaco. The most famous cave of them all, Lascaux, was found in 1940 by four adventurous schoolboys who tipped off their schoolmaster. Thus children, with their curiosity and freedom from preconception, have been instrumental in the revelation of man's primeval past. --Camille Paglia --Magic of Images (Arion)

When Paglia writes and talks, she jumps from one thought to another, sometimes making tiny hops, often making grand and heroic leaps. If she were in my freshman composition class, I'd tell her to drop some of her supporting points in order to explore the others in more depth; I'm not trained in the visual image, so I'd appreciate a little more explication.

This particular text, with the words separated spatially from images they describe, disturbs me -- I have to scroll back and forth between the words and the images. What kind of a web desiner would separate the images and lump together at the end? I'm sure they weren't separated during the original talk that this printed document was based on. A baffling design choice.

Anyway, this is more than the usual "what's the matter with kids today" article that older academics can't resist writing from time to time.

Unfortunately the economics of journalism push it into entertainment. Opinions (called columns) are cheaper than news as on columnist can crank out an opinion (based on the news of others) every day without leaving the office. Editorials ditto. Big colour pictures are cheap. Add a few token journalists that crawl around writing "in depth" stories about whatever place they are in when the story is due and you can call it a paper. The need to get linear inches from each live journalist employed, even if they didn't uncover anything of interest that day, encourages storytelling - the making of a story out of nothing at all - which is what we get. --Geoffrey Rockwell --Journalism and Storytelling (grockwel: Research Notes)

All of these tracks were then installed into a device known as, appropriately enough, a laugh machine. | This 28-inch-high apparatus resembles an organ, having 10 horizontal and four vertical keys and a foot pedal. The engineer "orchestrates" the laugh track by using the keyboard to select the type, sex, and age of the laugh, while playing the foot pedal to determine each reaction's length. --Ben Glenn --The Laugh Track (TV Party)

This gives new meaning to the term "playing it for laughs".

("Ha ha ha ha ha ha!")

It also makes me think of a certain machine from Barbarella.

("Ohhh... snicker snicker chuckle." )

One jarring aspect of proposals to reform scholarly publishing is that, all too often, they implicitly consider 'journals' as a single homogenous entity, to which one universal publishing model can be applied. On the contrary, diversity is everywhere. In any discipline, journals range from high quality 'must reads' with high rejection rates -- which in turn result in higher costs per published paper -- to publications which add little value to the articles as submitted, and are read by few apart from the authors themselves.

Journals are also published by a range of patrons, from individuals, and commercial publishers, to learned societies who use publication revenues to support their community in other ways. Likewise, a journal might be run largely by scientists working for free, or by professional editors. Some are electronic only, some have print editions. The list goes on. Any discussion of publishing models must surely take into account this heterogeneity. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. --Declan Butler --Access to the Literature: The Debate Continues [Introduction] (Nature)

Part of a forum on ways that new technology and the open-source philosophy are challenging the traditional methods of distributing (and making money off of) scientific knowledge. Via KairosNews.

In an online world where bloggers' frenzied mutual promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki - a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete - could hardly be more antithetical to the Redmond way. In a sense, the Wiki is to the blog what open source is to proprietary software: a communal effort where group dynamics rather than a leader's fiat determine the end-result. --Glyn Moody --Of blogs and wikis (Netcraft)

Wikis are a great tool for collaboration and concensus-building, but who wants to be entertained, amused, and challenged by the collective opinions of a faceless group that has carefully formulated its opinion into a seamless collaborative text? These tools serve different purposes. (Hat tip: Culturecat.)

Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kind of work that it requires for students and faculty. This article presents a qualitative case study of a Web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a taboo topic: students' persistent frustrations in Web-based distance education. First, this paper will analyze why these negative phenomena are not found in the literature. Second, this article will discuss whether students' frustrations inhibit their educational opportunities. In this study, students' frustrations were found in three interrelated sources: lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions on the Web, and technical problems. It is concluded that these frustrations inhibited educational opportunities. This case study illustrates some student perspectives and calls attention to some fundamental issues that could make distance education a more satisfying learning experience. --Noriko Hara and Rob Kling --Students' Frustrations with a Web-Based Distance Education Course (First Monday)

One of my upcoming projects is putting together an online course, "Computer Game Culture and Theory." While I assume that students who opt to take that class will have a high level of technological aptitude, I'll still need to be aware of, and compensate in advance for, the ways that my particular teaching style will have to change when transferred online.

I tend to over-prepare online handouts, adding to them year after year, adding ever more examples and explanations. One year when I filled out the syllabus in advance, with links to every handout and sample assignments to download, the students felt the website was confusing and overwhelming. The next year, I prepared all the handouts and supporting documents, but only added them to the online syllabus gradually, as the students felt a need for them. This caused a different problem, in that students felt a little frustrated that long detailed handouts appeared after they struggled with a much shorter set of instructions and produced a rough draft that, they felt, would have been better if they had known, in advance, the kind of document I "wanted" them to produce.

It's human nature to ignore the instructions, so I'm not surprised when students don't read the eight-page, densely hyperlinked handouts I sometimes foist upon them. In a face-to-face situation, I can very easily talk my way through any online instructions that are vague. I think I may have been depending too much on orally presenting information. Hmm... it's ridiculously late, but I just had a thought. (See next blog entry.)

Web loggers, or bloggers for short, are that new breed of armchair documentarian, chronicling the day's events -- politics, sports, music, arts, family, dating life, anything -- on Web sites that are updated daily, or several times a week. But unlike a newspaper Web site, which brings a new front page with new stories each day, yesterday's blog musings generally aren't wiped out by the next day's postings. Scroll down, and see what was on the blogger's mind yesterday, last week and last month. --Pittsburgh goes blog wild (Post-Gazette)

--IF Quake (Loonyboi)

I wonder whether everyone who claims to have downloaded it and played it is in on a grand April Fool's joke, so I'll just let you decide for yourself.