A Truly New Media Band

A couple summers ago, “That Crazy Game of Poker” by O.A.R. became our summer boating song. I see that they are coming to Purdue at the end of March, so I started doing some more research on the band. While viewing their website, their story sounds familiar to some of our discussions of New Media. If you’re not familiar with the band, O.A.R. is made up of five guys who have very different tastes in music. Thus, the band mixes several genres of music to create what they call “organized confusion.” Even one reporter called their music a “train wreck of many styles.” Also, the band became popular through file sharing. Only after they created their fan base did the band start begin to record with record companies. If anyone wants to check it out go to O.A.R. And…they have a really cool website

Flash stuff

Since we'll be looking at Flash, I thought I would throw these up. This is a link to a Flash animation I slapped together for a friend's site devoted to an old computer game:
The Wasteland HQ Grid

This is a link to a game I made in Flash called Arr! It's Mac only, so you might have to give it a go in the classroom:
Arr!

Lastly, this was something I made to learn Flash:

Mac version:
Mac KHB

Windows version:
Mac KHB

Enjoy?

EverQuest II - /pizza

Hungry?EverQuest II - /pizza

Don't know if anyone else heard of this, but now video game players will be able to order pizza without interrupting their game.

Writing Machines

Here are some of the links to the texts discussed by Hayles: del.icio.us/rhubarb.

Since it's week 8 of the semester, we're halfway through the class. At this point, I'd like to ask where you think we are in the course or what have we accomplished so far this semester?

In thinking and writing about where we are in the semester, what does Hayles add to the course or how does she fit into our course?

a humument

If you haven't found it already, I thought that some might be interested in Phillip's site with color versions of his work.

More Intellectual Property Law News

Matt Haughey reports on two items of interest in intellectual property law this week. The first concerns a new Seth Green parody in which he had to get permission to parody the "This is your brain on drugs" campaign. Apparently, the woman's phrasing and her voice were "the intellectual property of the organization." The second concerns the shutting down of the band Beattalica's site (a band who remixes the Beatles a la Metallica).

Aarseth

Aarseth's textonomy: Digital Textuality
Hmm.. having a few technical difficulties, just click on Aarseth and then click on "textonomy" in the second paragraph...sorry

Last semester I spent considerable time working with Aarseth's textonomy for (cyber)textuality. The link above goes to a discussion of Aarseth I wrote for a defunct website (never finished anything but Aarseth!). This is site was my first digital effort, please treat it like a kindergartener's first finger painting. My ego would appreciate that. Also, the bottom of the Aarseth page contains a link to an interesting article by Katherine Hayles on the limitations of cyber textonomies.

Santos

Blogs as Investigative Journalism?

Here's an interesting piece I found about blogs serving as investigative reporting href="http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0225-09.htm">
This seems like a cool idea as long as the information being posted is favoring "my" side. But I do wonder what happens to the idea of "authority" especially as established by credentials if "anyone" can post information into the public sphere. Not that this hasn't been the possibility all along but more voices are in the mix and more voices are accessible. Good and Bad I think.
In addition, I'm thinking about something mentioned by Patti Lather (the speaker some of saw last Thursday). She talked about using the techniques of investigative journalism as a way of approaching scientific research (I think I have this right). So I'm applying this idea to Information (capital I) that makes it to the collective consciousness. If blogs can be seen as points where information is transmitted they can also be seen as points where information is made....will they (at some point) be seen as authoritative sources? Will/can our students cite them in their OWN research?

Women in podcasting

Misbehaving.net reports on women in podcasting. They also make the link between the lack of women narrators in documentary and podcasting. Some other relevant statistics show that "women's voices make up only 25% of those heard in commercials" and "96% of voiceovers in promotional announcements for television programs are male." Reclaim the Media reports that on the three main U.S. broadcast networks, 87% of sound bites provided by experts were provided by men and women made up 32% of the correspondent pool and reported just 26% of the stories in 1999. Will podcasting prove a way for women's voices to be heard more readily?