I was in a classroom at Baruch today and I thought of this assignment, so I started to hear around for sounds I normally wouldn’t hear before. What caught my ears after class were the speakers in the front of the class. I ventured near the left one and to my surprise there was sound being emitted from it. There was nothing playing, so I figured the magnets in the speaker must be doing this on their own with the help of electricity. It was almost like a whistle blowing in the wind, but there was no base in it – an empty whistle. Think of the latter part of a flash bang grenade.

This article was a delight to read in my opinion for it was short concise and to the point. I was really surprised when the author stated that “students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather on “substance.”” This took a minute for me to absorb, but once I did it made a little more sense. Today, students of media might be looked at as people who take shortcuts and really don’t add meaning to their work. However, its quite the opposite when you look into what goes into these new media creations.

McLuhan goes into breaking down his “You” idea into many small ones. The one that really caught my eye was probably “your education.” In this bit the author says that children weren’t really a thing until the seventeenth century. McLuhan says that maybe because prior to the seventeenth century, children had to work as soon as they were able – and had to also provide for the house they are living in. The quote, “today’s child is growing up absurd because he lives in two worlds, and neither pf them inclines him to grow up” resonates this feeling of living a double life in one. Children can be living a child’s life, and all of a sudden be dragged into the world of adults.

Overall, based on the article I feel McLuhan provided an abundance of points towards the interpretation of new media. Perhaps the author views new media as somewhat of a lazy and non evolutionary topic. In this article, it might have been portrayed that new media provides good and bad traits in the industry. The quote, “the new technology demands that we abandon the luxury of this posture, this fragmentary outlook” meaning to abandon the idea of separate individuals walking around with separate fixed points of view. This is one of the many exploits the author goes through in this article.

I found Manovich’s chapter, “Principles of New Media” super intuitive, however did not find it as interesting as the previous article assigned. New media entails a lot, but when I took a closer look at it due to reading the article, I realized that the definition wasn’t clear to me. Even though I am surrounded by digital media and arts directly created using computers, it barely had occurred to me the progression that media had to have taken to get here. In Manovich’s article, he laid out the five principles of new media and that was very helpful in his breakdown of the influences that drive new media today.

As a CIS major, my knowledge lies in the digital world and my technical troubleshooting skills often have me deep diving into code to find problems. The part where Manovich stated that the first principle of new media was numerical representation interested me. I hadn’t realized it, but new media objects really are just a bunch of back end numbers and are just composed of digital code. Manipulating new media is as easy as changing a couple of numbers around for us. All the keywords that are incorporated in new media today such as digitization or resolution wasn’t thing during the time of the printing press and old media. Only until new media started to emerge, that we started to use technical terms to refer to media.

Another aspect of the principles of new media that I found to be eye opening is that new media today is very modular. Meaning, new media is made up of modules such as media elements (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). Manovich even explained how the world wide web is also completely modular. It has many web pages and each web page consists of other objects. These two principles really helped me align with the back end of new media and helped me gain a better appreciation for the technical side.

I wish to create a new tool for the problem that is; needing two bottles for ketchup and mustard (or any two condiments) when used in combination. My tool is a half and half bottle, that can hold one of each condiment on the sides and at the nozzle, two holes on their respective sides. When squeezed, both sides will distribute their individual condiment without one, needing two bottles and two, having to mix both condiments in one bottle!

This reading was really fun and appealing. A lot of what was said in the article I have told my buddies who are going into the arts, and a lot I have applied into my own life. Some things that stood out to me would be the fact that the author acknowledges the crazy voices in his head. A funny point would have been the fact that the author also acknowledges that being an artist, you may have to set proper expectations such as not making much money in the field.

I think another point that stood out to me was the point of learning to deal with rejection. I feel like a lot of novice artist fear rejection an instead, it should be embraced. The art you make may not be for everyone, and most of the time you will be making art just for yourself. Bad reviews just don’t define you in the long run, and you should use it to tweak your work even if it’s slightly. Also the point of leaving your comfort zone is something that all artists should strive to do because the point of “seeing as much as you can” is very valid. Touch and feel things you normally don’t, because even that can spark inspiration.

What I loved is also the point of art is just not for looking. In the article the author mentioned that, “Art has been carried into war; made to protect us, curse a neighbor, kill someone; been an aid in getting pregnant or preventing pregnancy.” Art doesn’t have to be a project  for display, it can be practical. Some people even consider practical crafts such as auto body work or a software engineering as an art form. Be confident in what you do and the rest of the world will follow.