Anna's Timeline

Rosen’s assertions that we, everyday folks, can now take control of the production of media content and are no longer merely consumers beholden to professional “media people,” is an assertion that I agree with because there is proof of consumers taking control of media content everyday. Going by the definition of media on dictionary.com, media is “the means of mass communication,” the internet is an inexpensive tool that an be used for mass communication just like the TV and the radio without the high startup cost.
An example of how consumers take control of media content is fansubs where people translate the movies and shows that they like into a different language so other users around the world can understand and appreciate it. Most fan subbing is done for free and does require a lot of time and effort to complete. The site viki is built on people subbing in various languages, English being the most dominant. How it works is that someone uploads a video that he/she wanted subbed and the uploader goes to look for segmenters (people who make cuts/pinpoint the parts where people start and stop talking) and subbers (people who know the language and are willing to sub). The speed of the project depends on the commitment of the segmenters and subbers. The beauty of this dynamic is that people who don’t know the language can also help out by being segmenters because it doesn’t require them to know the language. I believe that fansubbing is just a small part of how consumers can participate in media production and more and more as new platforms are developed, more people are trying to participate because ate given the opportunity to.

On the subject of tv and what it does, Shirky seems to agree with the hypothesis that watching too much tv causes “higher material aspirations” and “social surrogacy,” on the other hand, there is also a positive aspect that Shirky did not cover.

I remember a time where there were TVs and VCRs, no computers and laptops, VHS tapes and cassette tapes, before DVDs and CDs. I think knowing what it is like to have only tv and both tv and the Internet helps us understand the similarity and differences.
When I was growing up, tv took up a lot of my time. One thing that I think the tv helps promote is learning languages, especially for immigrants.

My mom is an immigrant from China and I was born in the US. As a kid, going from speaking Fuzhounese (a dialect spoken in parts of Fujian) at home to English at school can be a bit hard especially when I first started out. I believe that tv did help quite a bit in learning the English language along with going to school.

Like most children born in the US where English is their second language are quick to adapt, especially if they start early so speaking English fluently becomes no longer a problem.  However, growing up in the suburbs of Ohio, dominated by the English language, there was barely anyone who spoke Fuzhounese to me, except my family and relatives.  Since Fuzhounese is more of a dialect, it would be hard to communicate with other Chinese speakers because most speak Mandarin (parent of the other dialects) or Cantonese (a dialect spoken in mostly Hong Kong).  My mom wanted me to learn to read and write mandarin so she sent me to a Chinese school where they have 2hr class every Saturday.  This was when I was in middle school and since I did not speak Mandarin with my mother, the basic building blocks that helped me understand Mandarin and Cantonese was TV.  By watching video tapes and dvds of Chinese dramas and movies, I was able to comprehend what people said in Chinese school.

TV can be educational and helpful as long as it is our goal, much like the Internet, like Shirky mentioned, cognitive surplus is only generated when people choose to do so.

Manovich talks about how numerical coding and the modular structure allowed for the automation in media and how these are part of the principles of new media.  Automation helps save time by creating something from scratch and develop it to a basic form so that people would able to use it in a form that they understand.  For example, bb code is automated on most forums and blogs so that posting becomes easier and people would not have to spend time typing in every code.  The code is automated into a icon, and by clicking on the icon, people just need to put in the link whether it is a picture, gif, or video.  Other key features like bold, italics, quoting, emoticons, etc.

Automation is very important for any website that requires input from others online because most people who go online are use to the automation.  For instance, there was this forum that I visited and the administrator decided to relocate the forum so they created a new forum.  The problem was that everyone had to manually type in the code when posting, for example, if someone wanted to post a picture, he/she had to type “[IMG] link for picture here [/IMG],” imagine typing this every time posting an image.  I think changing from automation to manual discourages people from posting because I also saw that the site traffic also dropped drastically.  Once something is automated, people become reliant on it to the point that they might even forget or not even know the manual way of doing something.  Overall, I believe that automation has allowed more people to use new media but also changed the way we think.  We often times take what is automated for granted, thinking of it as its original form but if it was taken away we would not know how to do anything because we skipped the most basic part of the learning process which is learned manually.  Although automation makes things easier, people would be stuck if the automation does not work correctly.  A way to reconcile this gap is to know the manual way of the automation.

To many, Facebook is a social platform that allows people to socialize and get to know each other through the internet.   Facebook allows people to not only interact in a social network but also allows someone to see the networks of people they know, like being able to see the friends that the person knows.  Facebook also helps promote sharing of text, photos, and videos by making posting easy but also allows for spread because it is also posted on all of your friends’ wall.

However, Facebook is not only known as a social networking site but also a game site.  Games like Farmville, Restaurant City, Cafe World, Cityville, etc., can become an addiction where one can spend an entire day on a game, especially when one is starting out because of the simplicity of the game and the desire to level.  For example, I have spent some time playing Restaurant City and in the game one can hire friends, plant a garden, buy furniture and fixtures, and design the restaurant front and inside.  The objective of the game is to collect the ingredients and complete the recipes which have different levels and one gets the ingredients through trading with people, buying it through NPC, gardening, or freebies awarded for going on daily.  A person earns money by paying the workers after certain periods of time.  For me, Restaurant City was addicting because the rules were easy and there are a lot of different objectives that one can achieve.  Of course, after doing the same things for a while it can get boring but Facebook continues churning out new games, luring people into playing it through their social network because for most games, the more people someone has in their gaming network the benefits they get from the game, before you know it, you are hooked and trying to invite other people to play.  Of course, gaming addiction has been around for some time, the issue when Facebook games is that it threatens one’s privacy.  Often times, people will “friend” someone just so they could have people on their gaming network, forgetting the fact that by “friending” someone, you are being less selective to who has access to your private information and daily life.