Exploring New Media

I have to admit, I was trying to blog during the SuperBowl, but my heart wasn’t in it. Greg’s post about the ads yesterday reminded me that I was already missing the boat on relevance a day later and now that it’s Tuesday, and I’m still pulling this post together, and it’s getting to the point of complete irrelevance, which is more a statement of how fast topics move on in importance.

What struck me as I half-watched the ill-fated game was the importance of digital cable and on-demand video for how we view and re-view cultural moments such as the Superbowl and its ads. For example, take the infamous Justin/Janet “costume malfunction” of the 2004 Superbowl half-time show. It was early in my DVR experience, and when the infamous “malfunction” occurred, I was incredulous. Did what I think just happened, happen? Stop. Rewind. Replay. Pause. Stop. Rewind.  I can now stop time and slow it to the pace I need. What did we do before DVR?

All of a sudden, TV becomes a fundamentally different viewing experience. Though the NFL has implemented the “instant replay” for the first time in 1986 (and then abandoned it and then brought it back in 1999), now a large number or viewers of television have that power. Furthermore, even if some do not have that ability when watching television, the increasing pervasiveness of online video is making more and more moments available for us to play and replay over and over.

Meanwhile, we take it for granted that we will have access to much content whenever we wish. Ads during the Superbowl this season were touted as being available on MySpace after the game.  What other ways has increased user control and on-demand video impacted our role as “audience”?

One of the requirements I gave in the list of three blogs to link to this week was to locate an academic blog. Though it would be great if members of the class were to identify purely academic blogs, I mostly wanted to push people towards locating blogs where people were writing intellectually stimulating commentary. I have no problem with blogs that focus on more the matters of daily life, and in fact I enjoy them, and believe they serve a social purpose. However, for a college course, I would hope that are striving to locate a specific type of content from the midst of all kinds of information that we can find online.

In no particular order:

apophenia: danah boyd comments on her research in the areas of social networking and other new media phenomena, particularly, I believe, from a sociological perspective.

Confessions of an Aca-fan: Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, among numerous other books, writes about new media and convergence, particularly fan culture and transmedia development.

jill/txt:  Jill Walker Rettberg comments on online storytelling, among other topics.

theory.is.the.reason:  Kevin Lim writes about social technology.

grand text auto: A group blog, whereby several new media artists–Mary Flanagan, Michael Matea, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin– comment on the intersection of art and new media.

Greg starts out this blogging endeavor with a post about reading. There are a number of ideas mingled in the post from computer technology making information more readily available to the fact that there is so much information out there. “And,” says Greg, “it’s because there is so much to do on a computer that people are straying away from books and other print media.”

I am not anti-book by any means. I majored in English literature as an undergraduate student myself because I love books. I move boxes of them with what seems like annual moves, and even worse my husband has art books. Do you know how heavy those books are? Another caveat, not only do we have tons of books, but my husband is a printmaker. In other words, paper-based things go on at home.  But equating with the content of books with the need to read words on a page is missing the point. The recently released Amazon Kindle is one of the steps we are making as a society towards digital distribution of the written word. Is a book less of a book if it is distributed electronically?

The message I am really getting from Greg’s post is this: The type of reading where one person engages quietly and reflectively with a text *might* best be experienced with a printed page.  There are so many distractions in our daily lives that it is not just the literary engagement with the text that is important, it is developing an attention span to engage with something that lasts more than 30 seconds.