Writer Guild

If there has been one thing to rock the Media world in the past year, it would be the Writers Guild Strike. The strike of the W.G is important to media fanatics because it has showed how strong new media is starting to affect our society. It also shows how much of an affect the internet has formed on our experience of enjoying and experience video entertainment. Also these new mediums, like the internet, are starting to challenge the way business has been done before and the value we associate with these things.

The W.G. is basically striking because they feel that it is unfair that writers are not making any money off of the internet sales of shows and episodes and even the free airing of the shows on certain websites while the companies like NBC and ABC are making money off these episodes up for download and free showings.

Seeing the internet as a new medium to transcend, many T.V. companies hoped to make more money off of this new media by gaining more access for fans to interact and enjoy these shows and buy more from them. So many companies have set up deals with Apple and other companies like that where they set up their shows able for download for a certain price, allowing fans to take their favorite shows anywhere they go and keep up in storyline despite the busy life that many American’s live now. This seemed like a great idea because now many people can still enjoy their favorite shows but yet there also seemed to be a darker side to this, that being the question of who was actually receiving all that money.

Before the invention of the internet TV viewers were treated to what is known as ‘re-runs’, when a show would be replayed a number of time and every time the show was replayed the companies would get paid a certain amount. Yet, none of this money was showed to any of the writers for many years until finally under pressure to have writers companies had to give in.
As amazing as it was to see people get paid for their original work we also see how there was already friction between the W.G. and the companies on how the money for these original works was handed out. So it is only natural that with the birth of the internet we see these frictions and strain coming back into play since who really owns the things that are put out on the internet? That might just be the biggest question of the W.G. Strike. If we see this as a new and free domain then who owns the right to put whatever they want up there?

While it’s sad to hear about these writers being unable to be paid because their contracts do not talk about the sales of internet work and internet sales, it’s almost hard to feel that bad.
Not that I am siding with the companies or the W.G., it is sad to see that the playing field has become us, the viewer. Instead of talking it out and working out the kinks these two forces have started to gamble with us, the consumer. The W.G. say that without them the companies will lose fans and will crumble while the companies claim that viewers will be fine with re-runs and stay committed to their programs until new episodes come back on the air. It is almost disgusted that they have forgotten the true purposes of these new medians that have been developed, and that is to entertain, inform, and made to be enjoyed. While some new media has been created for business purposes we know from the past that entertainment and enjoyment has been very powerful to the development of new media and technologies. Now it is about money and which side will win out and get paid more.

It’s sad that the companies and the W.G. are in this battle and while it is sad that the writers are not being paid and they need this money to feed their families, it’s also sad to see how little the consumer means to them now.

Hopefully soon the two forces can come to a certain agreement. Yet with this agreement we will see a new change with the way the internet is viewed and how the media will be used in the future.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

No technology, what a trip.

So the question was posed, could actually real life college students go a full 24 hours without using any of their precious technology? While the question seemed sorta silly to some as they asked if this really was a joke while others dreaded the thought of not being able to use their radio, ipods, laptops and other trendy items for the many hours that stretched ahead. So we all seem to laugh at it and go on our merry ways, not really thinking about how things might go down.

While some of us did stick it out for the 24 hours and I am sure a few of us maybe kinda cheated a bit (I wouldn’t blame those who did) and then some of us just gave in and I hate to tell you folks but:

I gave in.

Yep, you heard it right here from the horses mouth. I gave in to the temptation of media yet there are good reasons why I gave in. As my friends, lovingly I will assume, joke that they would text me every 10 mins just to say hi and taunt me with their use of the phone and while my parents joked and gave little support about going a full 24 hours and saying I could not do it (thanks mum and dad, maybe that’s why I failed!) did not make me feel weak in any way about giving in to the media and while they said that they could go the full 24 hours and would enjoy every moment of it, the whole thing did make me notice something.


I believe even if I had tried fully and was as devoted to any media outlet sources and much as they believe I am, I still would have given in. For those who didn’t give in then good luck sister and brothers but for me? I truly believe because media is such an important thing to us and in our lives that many people if presented with this challenge would have given in. Technology has become such a major part of my life and the lives of those in our generation that there is no truly escaping it. I tried to deeply keep myself disconnected from technology including any glimpses of it, any sounds of it, as if we were living in the days and times before all of these things were around. Yet there was no true escape from it, I could not stay at my own home for the son of my boyfriend was coming over and since the house is only one level and I did enjoy how I coined the term, Nathan really is “a child of technology.” While only being 7 some of his favorite hobbies are watching t.v., playing video games, and soon to be the computer as they bought him his own little mock version of a laptop. So I could not stay there so I went over my parents. The only place that did allow escape from the technology of today was my old room in all it’s dark no t.v., no radio, no nothing but boxes glory which left me feeling empty and alone.


Which again made me to think. Without these technologies or the very easy access of picking up my phone I felt completely alone and almost exposed. I worried what events were going on without me or things happening without my knowledge. It was almost frightening to feel like I was alienated from the complete world. This had happen to me before I had happen to misplace my cell phone and felt like a loony person for feel so alone that it was driving me crazy. I can do without the t.v. for I hardly, almost never watch it and while the computer is something I am defiantly in love with would be hard, and music being the biggest strain not to enjoy it is this lack of connection and communication that left the biggest and most terrible taste in my mouth. It was the complete and utter lack of feeling like I was connect to other people and my friends.
That is why I also believe that families were much stronger in those days before the telephone and radio. While needing extra labor force these families seem to be connected by a stronger bound because they only interacted with each other for most of their lives. It’s been proven that human feed off the need for other people which is why humans have formed packs from the very beginning of time. Yet, they had no way to communicate with other packs which cause them to have strong ties to each other and create a deeper bond. I found myself doing this also by trying to be in the kitchen, or as many rooms as I know people would enter without having to hear a t.v. blaring or a radio exposing a lonely heartfelt song.


It made me long to be around them a bit more and hoping they would interact with me to help keep me occupied and happy as the hours went on. But then it became too much. I lasted 5 hours and 30 min and let’s just say that was enough for me.


I’d just likely to also point out as a last thought that while in my car driving home I turned on the radio and did not even notice that I had done so before I had gotten all the way down to my street. It has been such a habit of mine that to turn it on seems only natural. I can only say that I began to chuckle as I turned into the drive way shaking my head every step into the house that was filled with sounds of the movie ‘Cars’ being enjoyed by Nathan in our bedroom.

Two Cultures

There have been many debates over the years that address the age old question; does TV really make man stupid? It’s hard to state whether or not the electronic culture has really helped in lowering the IQ of many Americans of today but it is safe to say that TV has become a powerful tool in controlling how many people think, act, behave, and the way we develop the inner ‘I’.
TV, movies, music and the internet have drastically changed the world we live in by helping up exchange and develop millions of new ideas. Yet, somehow it has seem to dominate our millions of years old written culture which has allowed for written government, religion, and life to flourish through out the planet.

These two important points were taken with keen interest by Neil Postman and Camille Paglia who were both addressed the importance of it to each other over dinner as well recorded.
Postman took up the side of the print culture claiming in his points that the very gift of the print culture has so many advantages to it. Such as it’s importance over the image culture created by technology. Postman also comments on law being able to be traveled in space and time due to the written word which is very true and one of the very intelligent points that he makes.
As stated above, without the written culture people would not be able to have a fully working preserved culture that can transcend time. Even if we find articles of cultures, if they were without a written culture its very hard to understand fully who these people truly are, but with the written word we can discover who and how they performed daily duties. This is how cultures and societies like the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians have been preserved for thousands of years.

While Postman talks about the need for written culture Paglia looks at how important image culture is to humans. She argues that humans are visual based creatures.
Paglia also goes as far as to point out that the image culture is: "Nature--violent, chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable--predates and stands in opposition to the ordered, structured world created by the word, by the law, by the book centered world of Judeo-Christianity" (234)
With this she means that print culture is what keeps us in line yet image culture helps us break free of the bonds that print culture has created to hold us down and in line by creating this ‘Judeo-Christianity’ culture that rules even our government.
It is interesting to see the points both use in their arguments over which is more important. That which stimulates us visually or what stimulates us mentally?

Yet, the best example used by Postman really gives a grasp on how much the image culture controls us while the print culture frees us. Postman comments that using the Print cultures of Propaganda art, Nazis were able to control the population of Germany by abusing these images and resources. Which as recorded is very true, with the use of German Propaganda art, Hitler was able to paint images of a superior race lying in wait to bring German back to its former glory. It’s easy to understand why Hitler used these forms of mediums to control the population, because people are so stimulated by images that using them to find a scapegoat of a hurt nation was easy for the budding dictator.

People respond to these and use the image culture for terrible means because the image culture is easy to be manipulated and constructed by others with little notice from bigger sources. The image culture can be formed and distributed to millions without anyone knowing because messages can be retorted to small catchy sayings and hidden truths slipped in without a nations knowledge. While with the print culture many books and articles are checked then re-checked and questioned before they are published before a large nation.

Yet, the print culture is not without fault either since many print cultures have used printed materials to control other people and to justify their practices even when they are inhumane. Such example would be cultures in Sudan who use their religious text to justify female castrations at birth or in the girls youth. Or using their religious text to justify the genocide of another culture or religion. Many leaders read these text and take them out of context and go on crusades because of the stimulation they received through life by print text.

With Postman and Paglia make both good points it’s easy to see that both of these “Two Cultures” are at fault for what both judge each other for. Both cultures stimulate and form the way people see the world around them and other people that populate it with them. So we can say one is more at fault than the other but we can not place blame on one and not the other. It seems that the debate will range on between the written word and the world of the TV in which medium is superior to the other as both mediums evolve into new forms.

Literacy vs. Orality / Writing vs. Speech

In the very beginning, many cultures could not grasp the idea of writing things down. There was neither set alphabet nor system of pictograms that could communicate wide scale ideas and information around the world. It is hard to imagine a society that has any form of government being able to run with function yet having no system to write down what its learning’s, rules, and the very tradition of its own culture down. Yet, this was the truth of many people before the Greeks, who now researchers give, credit for creating a system of symbols with a given sound to them. Although, people in a society as ours, cannot understand how these people survived we must look at the context of sound and its different relationships to look at if these societies were really that much different from our own.

When we look at sound as an object, we have to look at its biggest relationship that has the strongest connection to it, which is time. Time has the biggest relationship to sound because it is time that creates the sensation given with sound. What sounds to form words are said at certain times is a good example of this relationship between sound and time. As Walter Ong put it (History of Communication pg. 67) “All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way.” If we put sound in this context than we can see the importance of sound, the way we say a word and what it means in that time place and what has not been written down in the past.

That is why its’ been found that in primary oral cultures and ones that are semi-oral that there is a limited vocabulary that is made up usually of action words. Ong presents many good examples of this “limited” vocabulary such as the word Dabar in the Hebrew language; which can be translated as either: “word” and event”. We can see that these words mean the same thing yet have two very different translations to themselves, which changes the complete context of the sentence that the speaker presents. Yet, that is important to note of primary oral languages, that this is essential to how they worked before. For the words, you said and what you said in that time was what had been important to the people, because researchers have found that these words usually conveyed to been enforced by power. With this idea the actions of re-calling is much more important to oral people. Without re-call, these societies would not be able to function and survive the way they had years before the invention of the written system.

Using this idea of re-call and the true impact of words, which we discovered is just as good as the writing system, then compared to the writing system, which allows us to sugar coat objects, we get into the topic of which is better. In the sense of a technology, based society writing has over taken us by means of the printing press, the phonograph, and even the invention of Morse code. Yet, when it comes to being honest and looking at human interaction it is the oral system that is superior in society. A great example of this is with the internet, on the internet there is a system known s emotion cons. These small smiley help express on a voiceless system how we feel to other people since there is no such thing as tone on the world wide net. Without using these, we could not express sarcasm, anger, fear and many more emotions that help us make the building blocks we have with other people. While we live in a technology ran society these oral skills have survived million of years and has become so superior to the writing system because the key to its survival has been so important to human existence and allowing people to live in societies. Without its success at allowing people to be honest with each other than people would not be able to live in the same place since oral language allows us to learn more about other people, as Ong has put it; “Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. Without harmony, an interior condition, the psyche is in bad health.” Using this ideology it is the knowledge that our voice and tone and vocabulary that gives us knowledge and knowledge to other people which in turns gives us unity and the truest sense of harmony that is found.

Media Habbits

Media habits are the habits that everyone of us has that involve any form of technology. Such as using the internet or your cell phone, each of us in our high tech society uses and has some form of media habits that we personally do every single day. Be it from downloading the latest song onto our ipod or our phones or checking out what the latest game fourm has to say.

Yet, it's easy to see why all of us have formed the habits that we do with using technology. Technology is an amazing piece of information that links us to everything we are and everything we are not. This linking of information has helped people find things they never would have experienced before.

If we talk about media habits from a non-internet technology stand point (i.e newspapers or the t.v.) then it's easy to say most college students would have little, to no habits with this median. Personally, I do not get the newspaper at my house because I live on my own but when at school every chance I get I remember to pick up an issue to catch up with what I have been missing what my no cable or no internet 40 year old house has been depriving me of. Which I believe is still important to do once in a while. I also make sure to check out (basically sniff around) any of the number of newspaper my father is devouring every morning. We also try and remember to check out the morning news when we actually wake up for when they show it.

Yet, from looking at a internet technology stand point many people have tons and tons of media habits they form. Personally WITHOUT the internet I would never be the person I am today. The things I am interested in and like are things so out there that without these habits I would be left completely alone with out any way to connect with people who enjoy the things I do.

Without the internet I would not be able to connect with sites like YouTube, I wouldn't be able to watch videos of the new hottest song I love to dance with, even though personally I am more of a fan of veoh which is slowly taking over the place of You Tube within the community of people who para para since the company that produces the videos are taking down accounts for these media habits and not buying officaial videos from them.

So without these medians such as YouTube and Veoh, fans like myself would be left out with buying $30 dvds just to be able to do what we like to do.

Another way I connect with people who enjoy to para para and the gyaru life style is using medians like Livejournal, which allows many different communities towards people interested in doing these sort of things. So that is one of my major media habits. I connect with most of my friends with using this site. It is a blog site that allows mass groups and communities for people to join in with and connect to make new friends. It also allows things like videos, songs, and pictures to be passed along people. Which is one of my favorite aspects of using livejournal is that I can now have access with millions of things that interest me at the span of just my fingertips

Or it could even be to just enjoy a rousing old hour of searching 4chan, a site which is as it claims, the place the internet goes to die and one of the favorite places of my friends. So I check it out now and then to understand where they come from to and to know the latest internet trend.

(Full of fail! You have won the internet)

I personally find these "nerdy" sites to be my biggest media habit. I think it's great that it's easy to access these forms because I am hope that these media habits of other people will make it easier for people who enjoy things like gyaru, anime, para para, or anything Japanese/foreign openly and accepted for these enjoyments.

I also think that these new advances in media habits will help people not feel so out of place in their own skin or feel like they have to be ashamed for being so geeky. In fact I love being a girl gamer and going to gaming forms, personally. I enjoy talking about the next nerdy thing on the internet and laughing right along side it with my friends. Because remember:

The blog I am following

This is the blog I plan to follow. It's an independent liberal blog source.

http://www.groupnewsblog.net/

Hope that is alright, for you.

Don't worry, it'll be quick and painless.

Hello, my name is Katie S. as some might know and some might not know, which is what makes this experiment so extremely interesting!

I am 18 years old transfer student that is currently attending UMBC. I live with my boyfriend, Joe (he's a musician, I am a dreamer), our two dogs. and our one lone beta fish.

The first is a mini wiener dog who is all red.

His name is Maxi and his personality is crazy but he can be really cute, which had seem to be the only reason we keep him around. Joking, of course. The second is a new addition to our small and hectic life, is a little puppy who is a mix of a wiener dog and a Chihuahua, so basically...she's kinda ugly. But she was blessed with bug eyes and long floppy ears to tickle the human heart strings with. Her name is Tira. The lone beta is a blue and red mixture and his name is Voldo.

Now, if you couldn't have guessed, I am a huge gaming freak. That is why, yes, all our animals are named after soul calibur characters. If you do not know what that is, it's one of your standard basic fighting games. The games have been around for a while and was part of the soul set. It even was on dreamcast, and the 4th one is coming out for PS3, so all you lucky fans out there I suggest you go pick it up. It is also getting a smaller storyline version for the new psp that is coming out. I told you, and I'll say it again, yes I am a huge gaming freak. I am not good at them personally, but I love to talk about them.

Actually, there is a number of things I am interested in that would shock some people. Such as my music taste, people assume that because I have piercings or tattoos I should be into heavy rock right? Not at all! I love hip hop, rap, trance, and almost anything that isn't American Rock! When I say American rock, I mean i enjoy rock music, just not bands in America, I find them to be over played and usually do the same thing over and over again. Just as I do not enjoy Finnish bands...they are simply scary. Yet, if you see me driving around campus you'll find me bumping beats and listening to whatever hot club song is popular at the moment. I love to dance so I am always listening to something that is easy to dance too or has a very bright beat in it. I think dancing is very therapeutic, and I like to just dance randomly in store isles.

Actually, most people wouldn't know these things about me since I am actually super shy. I try not to be but it's really hard for me to open up to other people. So, having a class where I just can't sit and take notes is really different to me. I enjoy discussions and talking to people but I know I can be super opinionated and hard to take sometimes. I like to listen to all sides but sometimes I feel that there are somethings that just need to be said.

I think that's why, personally, I find this assignment to be really hard. I mean...it can be super intimidating. When you think about the use of blogging at our fingertips, or what it means to other people who read websites or blogs like Perez Hilton. How literal will this be taken? And how will the information presented here going to form different opinions? How will you knowing that I am a major in Theatre make you see me? Or if you find out I am a stage actor? That I enjoy Broadway? Does that make me look nerdy? Or that I enjoy Japanese trance and stylish dancing routines made to them? That my goal in life is to move to Japan? I love bollywood films! I love the fashion movement of the girls in the picture above the text!

That's why I believe classes like these which look at media are important for student to have. I think it is very important we look at these things and see how they affect ourselves, each other, and how we see things. Since the Media is affecting how we view ourselves and how our personalities are shaped in general.

So, that is me.