Blog 11: Final Presentations

Describe in detail which of the final presentations you saw looks like it most powerfully and innovatively fulfills the requirements of the final project assignment and how in doing so it synthesizes and perhaps even productively revises or extends the course goals and structure as expressed in the syllabus.

First off I will tell you that I am partial to science fiction and futuristic inventions, mostly because of the short stories my group is writing for the final and also because it is a genera that interests me significantly. On that note the peoples presentations that caught my attentions were, Kelline's and Nick's projects. Kelline and Nick's ideas are similar in the fact that they are both basing their ideas off of Google, specifically Google glass which is about to be released early next year. Kelline is taking the idea of Google glass and advancing it so that it works off of not just voice commands but also brain waves. So you will basically always be connected to some type of device at all times. Kelline is planning on writing a short fictional story while Nick is planning on making gifs of what Google could become if it starts advancing beyond the Google glass and Google loon (Google balloon that provides wireless internet to people in developing countries and it is able to fly anywhere and maintain its location). I really was interested by Nick's idea because it goes into detail about realistic things that you would never think of. One of the ideas that Nick discussed in class was the idea that the mannequins in the store will be hologram like so that when you want to try on a pair of clothes you can preview it on the mannequins by uploading yourself as a hologram so it is you wearing the clothes. He is also coming up with other ideas that could potentially be the future if Google were to take over the world of wireless connection and information technology. I feel like both of their projects fulfill the final requirements because they have taken ideas that we read about this semester like Google and how it was born and also takes ideas like from Lessig and alters the idea of access to information and also the people or things that control that information. 

The other ideas that were a tie for me were John N.'s idea of remixing the audio diaries and music from the game Bioshock. I think that the idea behind this game is one of the best ones that I've seen. I've never played the game but I have had many people use it as a topic for their class projects this semester. From the snip-it that he showed us in class I can tell that it is very well put together and it defines remix to a T. I also thought that the trailer that Tim showed us about his project to make the comedy Tropic Thunder look like a real war movie. I especially liked that he remixed it with music from a serious movie to give the tone of being a war movie. The music he used was the theme from inception and he choose precise moments from the trailer so that it looked serious but it still had the quirky parts like Ben Stiller with the panda head that if you have seen the movie is a pretty funny part. 

Blog 10 (Extra): Jentery, Boyd, & Crawford

I found it interesting when they said that "90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone." This data wasn't shocking to me, being in the Digital Technology and Culture program these infographs are something that I'm quite familiar with. Wanting to be a graphic designer I am very familiar with the design aspect of these infographs. "They combine story, data, and design," they make the best and most effective way of getting the information across. These take stories and data and make them easy to read and also in an attention grabbing way. With the online world as it is you must have a great way to grab the attention of the readers, without this your information or story could be overlooked. I know that this works alongside my midterm project which was to write a story/prediction about something that will change in the next eight years. I chose to write a article as if it were part of a technology magazine. The whole point of magazine spreads is to catch the attention of the reader. Most magazines today are 50% ads, which if you are in the print design world is hard to compete with. To compete with ads your article design must stand out like an infograph. Below is an example of my midterm where I designed a magazine spread and wrote an article about my prediction for books and how they will change in the next eight years. I made my design eye catching so that it made you keep reading, and like a magazine I made sure there were visual aspects sp that even if the person looking at the magazine wasn't going to read it, it made them want to continue to flip the pages.
 

The video below ties the ideas of Big Data together. This helps explain how Big Data is changing out world, I believe there was a quote in the video saying that "the average person processes more data in one day than a person in the 1500's did in their entire lifetime." Seeing that is kind of crazy to think about the fact that we process more data than ever before. I know that growing up in the time of computers I haven't really noticed a huge change in the amount of data that I process but I do know that it has increased the more that social media and other web centered programs become more and more of our daily routines. Personally when I get bored and have nothing to do I tend to just scroll though my Facebook news feed, occasionally I will stop on a persons status update that seems interesting or funny, I will also occasionally open a news article or journal article that catches my attention. I also know that that ties in with the infographs, if something doesn't seem interesting from the picture or the title then I will most likely scroll right past it. In this video I found some of the facts really interesting, especially the part where they go into how bytes themselves are broken up and how much information we store in different amounts of bytes.

Blog 9 (extra): Social Networking Security

Freestyle: Reading about online privacy concerning social networking.

Being a child of the computer age, I grew up on the internet and grew up learning how to use the internet. The first social networking site I ever really used religiously was MySpace. I was in 8th grade when I created my MySpace account. It took a little getting used to but I found myself connecting more with friends on the internet verses in other forms. When I was elementary school (around 5/6th grade) I talked on the phone with my friends, we gossiped about which guys we thought were cute but we would do this on the phone after school. When I got into middle school we would message each other or comment on each other pages as a way of contacting each other. When I first created my MySpace page I found myself wanting to put information down that was fun, every one of my friends did the same thing. We were all 100 years old and from towns across the world, there were points when i lived in Italy then Egypt even though I really never lived there. An event did occur when I was in 9th grade, a cute boy at school was adding some of the girls at the school. This boy would message the girls and talk to them and eventually get their numbers and start texting them. Little did the girls at the school know this boy was in his mid forties and talking to many girls. The girls at my school lucked out and the man was caught before anyone was hurt but it was still a very scary event. This made me think twice about what I put on the internet and who I talked to. Being shy this wasn't hard I tended to only accept friend requests from people that I know outside of Facebook.

Security has always been a large priority and being in the age group that they surveyed in Raynes-Goldie Essay I was not shocked by that at all. "They found that despite the fact that Facebook users shared personal information, students ranked privacy policy as a very important public issue — even more important than terrorist threats." Personally I don't want people that I don't know to have access to my personal information, earlier this year I also had a identity scare. The company that my work sent my tax information to was hacked and my social security number was potentially leaked. Having this problem I wanted to make sure that I kept all of my information to myself, because of my information leak i had to be careful about identity theft and in our world today that can ruin a person. Having information on Facebook and other social networking sites is like leaving your identity out for anyone to use. I mean the show Catfish is a perfect example of what people can do with just a couple of your pictures. Catfish is an action of using someone else's pictures and talking to people on the internet using a fake profile. Most of the time these online relationships form and people are hurt no one knows why people do it, sometimes out of pain, or revenge, or possibly for personal enjoyment. These privacy problems all form over social networking sites.

Blog 8: Varian and Shapiro & Stiglitz on information economics

Freestyle

I wanted to talk about the dot com era. Growing up in the dot com era was different, I never really thought of the computer as something super special. When I was really young my parents gave me their first computer, it had a black screen with amber writing all I knew how to do was play PAC man and other generic games that you could buy on a floppy ..floppy that's something that makes me laugh. For me the internet wasn't really something that I thought of until I was well into elementary school and even then I really didn't know how to use it. I did learn eventually but the only website that i knew was Google and for the longest time I only used the internet to research for school and really nothing else. During the era that the books were published were during my very little knowledge of the internet so for me all I remember is my parents yelling at me to not talk on the phone or answer the phone when they were on the internet. The real dot com era really hit me when I was in middle school and social media really became a "thing" that kids my age were doing. At the time that I was just getting email, IM, and MySpace was around the same time that Mark Zuckerburg was creating Facebook which for the last seven years has been my newest social media.

When asked, how does what you do make money, and is that OK? I have to really think about it being a designer I tend to stray away from the accounting world and how companies make money. At my internship I try and listen when my boss talks money. I try and pay attention just so that I can explain to my own clients why things work the way they do. All I got out of it is why we have to pay listening and how more colors cost more because of the number of screens that it takes. The other talk about where money goes and our commission (as a company) and how people get paid. I don't know what I would do if people in my company messed up the accounts and I lost my job because of someone else mistakes.

There was a dot com era but I don't know what happened to those who experienced it may have had a bigger impact than it had on me. Growing up with out computers then slowly being introduced to them, I think made it easier for me to balence my life and why the internet is ruining some kids today.

Blog 7: Midterm Making Connections

Making Connections

This is a piece of work that I created for my internship. We were asked to create a visual magazine spread and also a copy (informational) spread. For the visual spread I wanted to create something that would inspire graphic designers and artists to create their own work and how to gain inspiration for their own work. A hard aspect of graphic design is making your own creations without using other people's work. With using other peoples works you can be sued for copyright laws. I wanted to show graphic designers that mixing images and words can give you a totally new image. The only problem is using and remixing images violate copyright laws. In this print I altered and used the logos for Google, Tumblr, Blogspot, and Pinterest. I altered the logos to fit with my design by doing this I am remixing and by copyright laws that is in violation of certain designs that are protected under those laws. As a designer I would have to get permission to use those designs and pay for every time that I use it. In Lessig's book Free Culture he discusses his view on remixing, his point is that people should be allowed to use stuff like under the creative commons licencing. I have a similar view to Lessig, I feel that you should be able to protect your work but I feel that with permission you should allow other people to use that work of course in a positive view. Remixing is a very difficult topic because there are the two extreme views, one is to protect everything only allow the public domain to be used, while the other is to let everything free and allow people to do with it what they want. Lessig is a supporter of Cretive Commons which as a designer you need to be able to use because inspiration and remixing cannot be done without other designers sharing their work.

Blog 5: Gleick 188-203

Prompt: what is the most complex or difficult about the reading's references to Boole, Russell, Gödel, Maxwell, and others? Why is it challenging? What words or concepts in particular are problematic? I pose these questions because I know that difficulty is often a way in or point of access: if you figure out what's difficult about a text, you've figured out its problem. That lets you investigate the problem. If you're a designer, an artist, a videographer, a musician, or somebody who works in media other than text, I'd love to see how you'd represent and upload to your blog the most complex or difficult problem posed by Gleick.

I guess one of the most confusing parts of Gleick's reading was the part of how analog sound is changed into binary digits of 1s and 0s.

To start I understand how 1s and 0s work in binary. How the numbers are placed so that the code makes since and ceates something out of that code. I guess I just don't understand binary as well as I thought I did. However, I did look up "How do you convert sound to binary" on YouTube and I got this video.

These two college students did an experiment on how to convert audio (songs from a Zune) into Binary using a computer program that they had to program. They went through trial and error trying to find the correct amplitude to fit with the 1s (or on position) and they used the 0s to represent silence. This still is over my head but I understand how it can be converted and what the 0s and 1s could possibly represent. This helped answer my original question of how it is converted into 0s and 1s, I still think that the total concept is over my head but I understand the basic meaning of sound and binary.

Blog 4: Gleick 125-143

Gleick writes early in the chapter that in 1849, "already railroad time was telegraphic time" (125). Why was this so? How did the invention of railroads lead to time zones? What are the implications of differences in the velocity and magnitude of transporting information and transporting things? Are those differences today getting larger or smaller, and what do you see as the effects of that trend? Find at least one Web link that supports your opinion and quote it and link to it in your blog post.

Gleick first writes about how railroad time was initially similar to telegraphic time. Telegraphic time is represented by the transfer and receiving of information through long systems of wires. The railroad is similar to this because of the idea that telegraphs carried information while railroads carry people and things. Time zones initially came about because people used to follow the time by where high noon was. So in different places across the world high noon was at different points in the day. This allowed the railroad to travel along with only taking a couple of hours. Condensing the travel time helped in aiding the time zones to be permanent. Time zones helped train travel because when they had to travel to places that were further it made scheduling (arrivals and departures) more accurate/easier to plan.

Today the difference in velocity, magnitude, and transporting information and things has increased. I believe that they way that we get information has increased. Now we have access to many different ways of getting information and things. Since the internet people can move information easily, but not all of this information is exactly good information. In my Sociology 430 class we discussed the way that news has changed due to social networks and news sites. People use social networks to share information then that information gets passed on to their friends. Just because we have access to the information and things easier but the problem with this today is the type of information that is getting passed around. Just in the last couple years a dozen celebrities "died" when in real life they didn't.

This is a link to an article on Forbes.com written by Ryan Holmes who owns a social media management system with five million users. Ryan states that "in the nine short years since Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com, social media has evolved from dorm room toy to boardroom tool. Last year, 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies were active on Twitter, while more than 80 percent of executives believed social media engagement led to increased sales." This may seem normal to us growing up surrounded by new social medias being developed every day. Having companies attached to social networking gets there things and information out there for ht world to see. This seems to be increasing the velocity in which information and things can be distributed. The speed at which information is being uploaded and distributed is increasing dramatically over the years more and more information (good or bad) is being digested by people on social media and just the internet in general.

Blog 3:Lessig 161-173

Prompt: You should answer in more depth and detail the question we started talking about in class on Monday, using examples from the videos we've seen and from your own experience, and connecting the examples to quotations from the readings: what are the most important "harms" that you, personally, see facing the ways intellectual property operating today, and how are those different from or similar to the harms faced by previous generations?

In class on monday my group was faced with the question of what types of sharing that wsu students and staff currently engage in, and what types are the legal, economic, and ethical implications of doing so? My group came up with tons of ideas. Economic problems that staff and students contribute to are the use of libraries because the school has to pay for the use of articles and books and allowing students and staff free access to the books. Other types of books that can cause economic problems would be textbooks because students either find ways of getting the books by sharing or they sell their books for prices well below the market value which means that the publisher is losing money. Some legal issues that students and staff have is with file sharing because some students use this and it is illegal because of copyright laws. Students and staff also face the problems with making sure that they cite their sources and also cite all the types of things they use in their works if they don't it is either plagiarism or copyright, having either of these happen can cause major legal problems for the person using the source. Some ethical implications our group came up with was that old tests and papers that students keep a collection of a give to other students to help with tests or papers. These types of things have ethical and economic implications. The ethical implications are the integrity of the student using old tests to cheat or old papers to cheat, the student will have their own conscience guiding them and telling them what is right and what is wrong. The economic implications of tests and papers that are being recycled means that the money that you pay for the class but you cheating yourself out of the money you are paying for the class.

Blog 2: Lessig 85-115

Freestyle: Based on the movie Copyright Criminals.

The movie Copyright Criminals made me think a lot about last semester when I watched the movie RiP: A Remix Manifesto. I loved this movie I thought the ideas in it were good arguments to challenge the copyright laws and bend the rules for art. The best part of the topic is listening to people like Girl Talk talk about his passion for making art. Copyright laws on music (as we learned in class) is different than other copyright laws. Movies like this make me want to join the side of the remix artists and challenge the copyright laws. But I also feel conflicted because as an artist myself I also do not want other people using my art and calling their own. I did not realize this till I was in my graphic design class and I was creating digital pieces of work that could easily be altered and changed to remix them. Also as an artist I want to be able to use other peoples art and make my own because remixing can fuel creativity.

This creativity and wanting to keep my work as mine can be conflicting. To help solve this problem Creative Commons was created. Creative Commons was created to allow people to get copyright license for free. You also get to choose how people use it and how people republish it. The author can choose if they can use it for commercial purposes or not. As a creator myself the ability to allow people to use my art and alter it just as long as they give me credit. Publishing your art via Creative Commons helps some artist get their work out there and also use other peoples works to create new things.

Blog 1: Lessig 21-47

Prompt:
From the Lessig and Gleick readings the talk about about the 'right to tinker.' What are some other good examples you've seen in the DTC major of you and your peers using the right to tinker? How much has that right been constrained or opened up by the technological tools you use?

Response:
In the DTC major personally I have used many different types of inspiration these types of inspiration usually help me in my art and other multimedia projects. Specifically in my DTC 336 class I used google images quite frequently for inspiration or for elements of my designs. A project I worked on for class was to take three logos from different companies and mold and mash them together. Once we came up with a single logo using elements of the three we came up with a new company name. This is similar to what disney did when he took inspiration from the Grimm stories and took inspiration from them to make his own stories but still using the basic plot line. The logo I designed is below the inspirations and elements came from the companies Burton, Roxy, and Monster. This class used inspirations from many different companies. For the final project in this class we were asked to redesign or design for an actual company, or show, or book. Many of my classmates decided to to redesign logos for companies. The 'right to tinker' has allowed DTC students to use found items in projects or alter found items for projects as well.

This 'right to tinker' has improved and hindered the creative process. The tight copyright laws have helped designers be creative and make new types of designs and has helped their creativity create their own works of art. It also helps because it allows other artists to protect their work from being stolen. The 'right to tinker' has allowed us to take designs and alter them as long as the author allows alterations and credit is given. Copyright laws have hindered people from taking pieces of other designs to create something new. These things are called remixing, these remixes have cause people problems with the law.