Mashup Final

Making the Mash up

My original goal was to tell a story with the pictures, illustrating how we human beings thoughtlessly treat our physical environment and showing the negative effects our behavior has on the planet. Then we were assigned to incorporate videos into our presentations.  I used cartoon clips of global warming because I decided I wanted my story to be understandable to everyone from a child to an adult.  I found that the still images, even allowing for the Ken Burns effect, got a little boring after a time. The incorporation of videos made the presentations more lively and engaging, perhaps especially to those of us who have grown up in a world of images flickering across screens of all sorts at all times of day and night. I also found the contrast made the still images more powerful. Then we had to incorporate music and so I hunted on Youtube for a song that had to do with global warming. The challenge was to make the music match the video/pictures; to have the three mediums all fit together in a seemingly natural way. I decided not to use too many of the fancy techniques like speeding up the video, or playing multiple audio. Because I am new at this and cannot use them with finesse, I was afraid of creating information overload and too much going on. When I first made the video I had animated segue ways into each picture, but it was too much to look at, so I changed to a fade to black at the end, to really emphasize that the video was indeed ending. An interesting thing I discovered in the process of doing this assignment: I was shocked how many videos there are on Youtube whose goal is to illustrate that global warming is a hoax.

My First Mash-up (and YouTube Video)

Research Paper vs Mashup

When assigned to do a research paper, you think, “Man, I got to go find myself some good sources.”  This time we were assigned to do a mashup; a slide show of pictures on a current controversial topic. So now I’m thinking, “Man, I got to go find pictures, and I need permission to use them.”  As Lessig points out, citing for music  or using images is a lot more complicated then just giving credit in a bibliography at the end of a paper.

I find myself stuck on the very different images that are conveyed by the words “research paper” and “mashup.” According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, the meaning for mash is “to reduce to a soft pulpy state by beating or pressure; to crush.”  The meaning of research is “studious inquiry or examination; the collecting of information about a particular subject.”  If I was illustrating the idea of writing a research paper I might look for images of someone in a library or sitting at a computer with a pile of books by their side, their head propped on their hand (to convey thinking.) I am stuck when I try to think about what image would convey the idea of a mashup.  The image in my mind prompted by the word “mash” is an act of violence, the mashing of a potato.  The image created by the word “research” is one of silence, dust motes floating through the air in the light of my computer screen.

Okay, so a research paper is writing to clarify and explain and persuade the reader of my idea, using citations from other people’s work to support my idea.  A mashup is using other people’s words and pictures arranged in such a way as to express my idea.
My topic was Global Warming. Instead of reading books and websites, then writing page after page of text sprinkled with quotes, I had to try and find pictures that would capture my viewer’s attention and express my idea. I probably had all of one minute to get my idea across.  To create an effective mashup still took a lot of research, to find the best pictures to illustrate my idea.  It took time to arrange them most effectively.  I still had to use those critical-thinking skills, the development of which are supposed to be the mark of a good education.

Lessig reports that people between the ages of  15-19 on average only read for seven minutes per weekend day, yet will spend an hour playing games and using the computer for leisure.  I don’t think those people are any more likely to put in the time to develop a good mashup, simply because they could do it using a computer, than they are to writing a good research paper, which requires reading multiple sources.  And I wonder if, before the advent of computers, the average 15-19 was spending a lot more time reading.  And using the computer for leisure doesn’t mean they aren’t reading on that computer.

I think that assigning both research papers and mashups would liven things up a bit.  It would also allow for teaching students more ways of using the computer to find, evaluate and manipulate information, an area in which our education is seriously lacking.

#Twitter Private

    Facebook and Twitter are two hugely popular social media sites serving very different functions. While Freishtat and Sandlin may be harsh in their judgment of Facebook, I think perhaps they would find Twitter the lesser of two evils. Facebook has many uses, including pictures and text. With Twitter, your comments are kept at 140 characters, and your bio can only be 160 characters long.

    Twitter is used by many different people with very different concerns; from the cast of the Jersey Shore informing you of parties, to the President of the United States telling people of the latest bill passed, or his plans for the country. By allowing people to repost or “retweet” what someone says, Twitter is in its way encouraging a sort of dialogue among users. This is really the only way your privacy can be violated on Twitter. This is a big difference with Facebook, which not only has your personal information going out in so many ways, but where someone can post pictures (or information) that include you on their Facebook page without your consent.

    While Facebook is more useful for actually carrying out conversations, Twitter can be a place to go to follow breaking news stories like the riots in Egypt. It was first reported via Twitter that the Phillies had signed pitcher Cliff Lee, a story of great interest to baseball fans. Some people believe Twitter has brought celebrities closer to the public. Athletes like Chad Ochocinco hold competitions on their Twitters where the winners get tickets to their games, or ask fans the best places to eat in certain cities. Of course, there are many who cannot understand why anyone needs a Tweet everytime an athlete takes a walk or gets a massage.

    Freishtat and Sandlin believe that Twitter minimizes disagreements, but I’d say it is rather like choosing to be friends with those who agree with you – a not uncommon human way of choosing companions in the flesh as well as cyberspace. Twitter allows you to choose both who to follow and who follows you, and you can easily set your tweets to private, so it is a lot easier to manage than Facebook, with its greater variety of privacy settings. It is hardly surprising that there are so many ways to communicate with each other via modern technology; after all, before the web we also had many choices -we had letters and telephones and telegrams and faxes, not to mention radio and television for getting news. Our choice of method perhaps was equally dictated by what we were communicating. While it is important that we think about the implications of the new technology, I must confess that Freishtat and Sandlin sometimes sound a bit whiny to me. Would they want to go backwards to a world without the web, which was also a world with more discrimination, less concern for the environment, etc.?

Does Facefook run our Lives?

I feel that Richard L. Freishtat and Jennifer A. Sandlin fear what lies ahead for Facebook because so much of what Facebook is doing is uncharted territory.  Certainly as Americans (and perhaps human beings in general), we have a history of embracing new technology without first deliberating on its possible implications for our lives as a whole. But often we cannot even imagine the implications in advance; for example, who would have thought that automobiles and all the wonders of the industrial revolution would have led to global warming and the possible death of the planet?

I think what the authors are reacting to is the speed with which Facebook has become a part of our lives, not only in the social area, but in politics and the workplace as well.  Facebook is not even ten years old and yet it was influential in our last presidential election.  Employers have been known to use it to check on activities of current and potential employees.  Many cultural organizations use it to give their supporters a greater sense of interaction with the organization.  It appears that soon it might not be a matter of choice whether or not one joins Facebook, but rather how one will handle the privacy settings.
Freishtat and Sandlin throughout the reading talk about the evolution of teaching and that it should be adapted to factor in new technology; I heartily agree with them on this.  The critical-thinking skills we are supposed to be taught in school should be applied to how we use Facebook and web use in general.

Their point that “attention, in a very real sense, is the new money” (p507.) is particularly interesting. Some employers have blocked the site because they fear it interferes with work production. One college near my home blocked Facebook for a week as a social experiment, and almost all the students admitted to getting a lot more work done in that frame of time. I have walked into a room where five friends had gotten together specifically to spend time with each other, but everyone was using/looking at a mobile device (telephone/IPad/computer/etc.) rather than looking at each other. What has changed so fast is what it means to be “present”.  Living in the moment seems to mean always checking communications or information from those who are not present.  I think this what the authors mean by Facebook being hostile to “deliberative possibilities.”  You cannot “deliberate” or ponder, if you are always immediately responding to or acquiring new information.  Perhaps we have forgotten how to “stop and smell the roses.”

theChive vs. Flickr

In the article “Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning,”   Bryan Alexander discusses both some of the networking innovations of the web and the possible uses of these sites for academic learning.  This got me thinking about how we are educated to use the computer as children: it is probably time to think about making changes in that process. When I was assigned my first research paper in fourth grade, the only specific direction we were given was not to use Wikipedia because it could not be trusted. As I moved up the educational ladder, I was never given any more detailed guidance on using the web for research. Perhaps it is time for children to get a modern version of what students got in the past, when they were introduced to how to use a library. Children need hands-on teaching of how to navigate the web and they need guidance on how to evaluate the information they find there. If our research papers are supposed to get more sophisticated as we get older, we need to begin learning how to use the tools at a younger age, so that our understanding and manipulation of them can grow along with our intellectual maturation and curiosity.

The person sitting next to me in class was on theChive, which I had never heard of before. He described it to me as “a site where you go when bored to find funny a** stuff.” When I visited the site, it described its goal as being to have “the best funny, viral and interesting photos from around the world” in one place. If my classmate is a representative user, then it seems their goal is simply providing a humorous chuckle: they are pretty successful at it as they get almost 300,000 hits daily. This is more of a niche website, geared for a certain audience who finds these sorts of images amusing.

The goal of flickr is two-fold.  In the “About us”, they say it is for anyone who wants to show off their pictures to be a web celebrity to everyone, or one may securely share pictures within the family. This would seem to make the site useful to a wider group; the people who want to be “web celebrities” and perhaps older people who don’t belong to Facebook but want to share pictures with family.