Speaking of missing journalism, I was first introduced to World AIDS Day when fulfilling the last journalism requirement for my bachelors. I did a Storify of activities in the D.C. area throughout the day. Writing the story and compiling the Storify attached me to cause. It has been close to my heart for several years now.
You can find the link to my original story here.
To learn more about World AIDS Day or to donate click here.
I never thought I’d say that. Ever.
I thought I had chosen the wrong major, but my scholarship wouldn’t pay for me to reroute and take a fifth year, so I trudged through. Once I graduated I never looked back… Until a month ago.
I have been participating in a Twitter chat with the American Copy Editors Society, ACES. (The hashtag is #ACESchat. They’re every other Wednesday. The next one is December 3, just FYI.)
I love them.
I look forward to them. They’re the highlight of my week. I love taking an hour out of my day to just talk editing with other people who regard it highly. That’s uncommon, even among journalists. I’m planning to attend their conference in March 2015.
Then two weeks ago a professor of mine asked my class to live tweet a political panel of journalists who’d covered the midterm election. My heart soared to hear so much journo talk. After, my professor told me that he could tell that I missed journalism.
I thought,
“no I don’t… Do I? I miss journalism? I miss journalism!”
I still can’t believe it. I’m slowly starting to accept it’s truth though and I’m making plans to get back in the swing of things very shortly. We’ll see how it goes.
Am I alone in this? Did you ever leave something you thought you’d never miss and then suddenly miss it?
I fell in love with The Hunger Games much later the most people. I believe that you can only be a fan of one Sci-fi/ fantasy series. Mine is Harry Potter, so I had a hard time even accepting that I liked the Hunger Games, but I did. I’ve only read Mockingjay and that’s because I couldn’t bear to wait for the movies to learn what happens. I’ve now seen all three movies.
Needless to say, they’re great. Jennifer Lawrence is amazing. It was wonderful to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman, to whom the movie is dedicated, one last time. I have some complaints, but that’s a different post.
I did notice something. When discussing new media in pop culture, the best place to see it are in movies. One of the huge debates among new media theorists, is that all new media developments are not good. Humanity should be wary of just developing new media without questioning the complete range of potential am uses.
If there was ever an example of new media used for bad, it is in The Hunger Games series.
Those animal creations we see in the arena, i.e. tracker jackets, the communication/surveillance devices, the weaponry used by the Capitol and the Revolution, are all prime examples.
Watching the movies just reminded me of reading Evgeny Morozov’s theory of technical solutionism. Just because we are able to make some technologies doesn’t mean we should make those technologies. We shouldn’t see every advance as beneficial to humanity. It may not be, but we can always hope that the odds are ever in our favor.
For more work by Evgeny Morovoz see the video of his talk for The Gaudian. You can also follow him on Twitter @EvgenyMorovoz
I was perusing Twitter this morning and came across this article on The Verge. Microsoft will offer the mobile versions of its Office software for free. The article is great but the finish is what caught my attention:
It’s a bold move from Microsoft, but also a defensive one. Microsoft’s competition will now have to look elsewhere to plot their Office attack.
I’d have to agree with the author; Microsoft is attempting to push back against Apple, but in my mind, they’re doing it better. I love Apple with all my heart. I do. However, they are only offering iWork for free to those who purchase new OS X Mavericks devices. People like me, long-term lovers of all things Apple, who own four perfectly good Apple devices, were left out of the excitement.
My point being that Microsoft not only did Microsoft surprise and support their long-term users, the die-hard PC lovers, but they also piqued the interest of Mac users that Apple left behind, like me. Smart move… ball in your court Tim Cook!
Microsoft is clearly playing for keeps. You the real MVP Satya Nadella!
New Media Studies is a very broad field of study; its students could end up just wondering through different classes without really creating a coherent set of skills for themselves. In order to avoid that, my professor challenged us to critically examine our plans for our time here at DePaul and present them creatively, by drawing a map.
Here’s a good time for me to make a confession. I am NOT creative. The simplest of creative tasks are usually quite challenging for me, so I’m quite proud of the creative spurt I had during this class.
The Monopoly inspired plan I created for my Proseminar class. Please click to enlarge.
I was inspired by my favorite childhood board game, Monopoly. I turned each cluster of classes or skills into a square on the board. All the squares were given names based the cluster it represented plus a street, drive, circle, boulevard, etc. in in order to go along with the names of properties in Monopoly. It also includes a “DISTRACTION!” square which is the equivalent of jail and Internship and Graduation squares which are similar to chance. Of course, I gave the Dream Job Boulevard the same space as the most coveted Boardwalk in the real game.
When I shared my design with the class a few of my colleagues found it interesting, so I thought I would share it here as well. My classmate Robert, of Robert’s Hilarious Design Blog, said the Monopoly game was a good idea because life is like it, a mix of good and bad.
I’m so glad for this assignment. It really helped me see exactly what my goals are. After feeling like I spent the entirety of my undergraduate career confused, clarity is a beautiful thing.
Ain’t gone be no conflict. I’m the only one who bought the iPads so I’m the only one who gets to make the plan.
This is what my mother said when I asked her what conflicts she foresaw arising from her regulation of my brother and sister’s iPads. I was interviewing her because I was analyzing my family using an information ecology metaphor, as constructed by Bonnie Nardi and Vick O’Day in Information Ecologies. “In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology.” (Nardi & O’Day, 1999, 49) The authors use the ecology metaphor because it allows for the most complete analysis of the relationship between humans and technology. Using this analysis, Nardi and O’Day argue that all members of the ecology should be included in the conversation when planning to introduce a new technology into an information ecology. That being said, what I think the authors are missing from their analysis is role of power.
What happens to an ecology where open discussion just isn’t possible?
In the case of my information ecology, my mother was expressing an unwillingness to even include my siblings in the conversation. When I went to write my paper, I noticed that Nardi and O’Day do not address this in their book. They do give an example of an ecology where all parties were not included in the plan for the ecology but they do not provide suggestions of how to help get all parties involved and balance the scales, how to get the conversation started. The example in the book led to mistrust and strained relationships between the people within the ecology. I don’t want that to happen in my family.
Nardi and O’Day say, “just talk — has the power to change things…” (75) That’s only if you can get a health conversation started.
The reason I thought I should share my love for this book on my blog is because the characters, like many of my peers, are steeped up to their eye balls in new media. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is about a young man, Clay, who gets a job at a 24-hour bookstore, only the store is just a front for a secret society. His attempt to update the bookstore’s online presence and stir up more clientele sweeps Clay into a mystery as old as the printing press, with the bookstore and its proprietor at the center. Clay’s boss, Mr. Penumbra goes missing and Clay seems to be the only one who notices or cares. In his search for Mr. Penumbra, Clay discovers that the bookstores he works in is really a front for a secret society that has been working on the world’s oldest brain teaser. Clay, his best friend, and his girlfriend, Kat, who works at Google — that’s a awesome enough reason to read it right there– take some serious risks to figure it out.
Here are three reasons I think it’s a great read:
The cover of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
This book has a lot of technical jargon but don’t give up. It is also full of mysteries, twists, romance, and happy endings. It is so worth it in the end.
Last week, Jeff Rice from University of Kentucky visited DePaul’s Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse to lecture about his coming book, Craft Identity. It’s all about social media and society told through the lens of craft beer. Rice is really seriously into craft beer.
The flyer for Jeff Rice’s Lecture at DePaul Univeristy on October 21.
I noticed immediately that Rice is heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan, the author of The Medium is the Massage.
A short aside: McLuhan is extremely abstract. He argues that society is now governed by print media rules, logical uninterrupted arguments that flow from beginning to end. But digital media now dominate we continue to judge digital media by print media standards.
Now back to Rice. He argues that to understand the power of social media we have to throw out the print standard that arguments flow from one complete thought to the next. In social media, it’s more like a series of thoughts that interrupt and overlap each other and make a complete argument or pattern.
Now comes the interesting part, he made this argument by writing his book as a series of thoughts that interrupt and overlap each other. It was an interesting concept, although a little hard to follow, given the venue.
After a serious mulling and a talk with a professor who attended the lecture as well, I was able to piece together the description above. I’m certain Craft Identity will be required or recommended reading for one of my upcoming classes. I hope I will better understand once I am able to read to whole book for myself.
Find Rice’s other books here.
So of course the week I volunteer to be one of the class discussion leaders I have nothing. The reading was not cool or interesting and I had the hardest time coming up with something dynamic to engage my class. Yay for me! The following is my attempt at questions to stimulate the discussion my class will have later:
Before reading this I had never thought of the computer as an encyclopedia, but now more than ever we turn to our computers whenever we have questions. Nine out of ten conversations I have with my mother at some point one of us says, “let’s just google it.” Our computers remember everything for us. I know only two phone numbers by heart, my mother’s and my grandmother’s. I have hundreds of numbers stored in my phone though. Not just phone numbers but email addresses and physical addresses as well. I don’t even try to remember things anymore. I just store them on my computer and go on with my day.
Do our computers allow us to forget everything?
In a different class we talked about the idea of trust. We just trust that our machines and networks will work properly although we don’t really understand how they work or know how to repair them if the malfunction. A primary example is an ATM. We simply trust that the ATM and its network will just know that we deposited $200 and our online bank account will reflect.
Do we trust these machines to remember forever?
We know these. They’re all over campus. And when we see them we assume that when we use them they will work.
What happens on that God forsaken day when we wake up and the computers have decided to forget everything too?
My class has been discussing Turkle’s Alone Together, in which she decribes several people who have seperate lives online. I talked about Pete, who had a second wife in the online game Second Life, in an earlier post.
It all reminded me of this clip from The Big Bang Theory where one of the main characters looses his girlfriend because she catches him “cheating” on her with a troll in the online game War of Warcraft. I talked about it in class but no one watches the show so I thought I would upload the video for everyone to see and enjoy.
In the video, Howard, guy in trouble, is asking Penny, friend of ex-girlfriend, for help on how to repair his relationship after the “hot troll deviation.”
Enjoy! The show really is hilarious.
Aset Editorial Services 