Useful Videos

There are some very useful responses to web 2.0 here http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/mmclips/buckingham_mediawebparticipation.php

David Buckingham could be used as a critic of Henry Jenkins - web 2.0 and the blending of old and new media creating a participatory culture whereby people collaborate and share information and ideas. Buckingham suggests that the internet only reaches those who are interested in a particular area and are willing to go and source information about it. He says mass media reaches more people.....what do you think. A very interesting counter argument I think - remember the exam is all about you being able to construct a debate.

The username for the site is mediamagazine8
and the password is w459k2

YouTube

A graphical representation of points about YouTube:

[Via: Online Schools]
Some of this is now dated (most popular video etc.) but there are useful facts to learn here.
Found at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/never_gonna_give_you_up_youtubes_path_to_world_domination_infographic.php
Read Write Web have many articles on YouTube. Search for more.

Future of gaming?????

I thought i'd share my thoughts with you all......I've just finished watching a Bruce Willis film called Surrogates (2009).

Film trailer


The following video outlines the concept of the film


The film made me think about the gaming industry - due to the proliferataion of digital technology the gaming industry has been radically transformed - PS3 and Xbox Live enabling players to play one and other via a broadband connection, online poker games and online gaming (world of war craft and second life). Some would argue that second life is what Henry Jenkins would term a participatory culture or in terms of David Gauntlett's collaboration, a garden that everyone can work on together (building and existing in an alternative world). It is the link with second life that I want to explore further.

The film to me hinted at the potential future of the gaming industry/culture (the blending of the two is what Jenkins refers to as convergence). In this sense the boundaries become blurred as to what is real and what is a game. It made me think about whether the platforms of web 2.0 and the continuing development of digital technology would realise this. In the future could we have a surrogate double (someone who looks like the person we'd want to be) that lives out our life without the fear of pain, accident etc? Could we do all of the activities that we wanted to because there is no fear of consequence? accident? We would ultimately have as many shots at life as we want to yet somehow it's not a game as our surrogate would continue to perform our occupations etc.

A very controversial idea??

Watch the film and see what you think.

Essential resource as tweeted by Julian McDougall

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/untangling-the-web-with-aleks-krotoski

Useful Article about the impact of social networking

Evgeny Morozov: How democracy slipped through the net
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/13/evgeny-morozov-the-net-delusion

Nicola's thoughts about Avatar

Avatar, to me, is revolutionary. James Cameron epitomises some points raised by Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture. For me, the film is an excellent example of the blending of old and new media in order to lure the audience back to the cinema, following a decline in dvd sales. Not only does James Cameron use performance capture to provide human emotion to CGI characters (in real time) he is one of the first directors to use a virtual camera on set (enabling him to see the performance of the "human" actors as "CGI creations" in realtime.). Cameron also, attempts to change 3D cinema and make it appear less like a feature/attraction and more like a technique to compliment the special effects and bring the world of Pandora to life. Moreover, the film converges traditional film making (costume, art, actors, reference cameras etc.) with new digital film making (pushed to it's limits - performance capture in real time, digital prosthetics).

Henry Jenkins + Convergence Culture

Below there are some passages from Henry Jenkins' book, convergence culture, explaining what he means by convergence and participatory culture.

What's it all about? Here are some key passages from the book's introduction:

Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence....

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who's speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

Basically he's talking about the blending of old and new media.

This circulation of media content - across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders - depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer. I will argue here against the idea that convergence can be understood primarily as a technological process - the bringing together of multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices. Instead, I want to argue that convergence represents a shift in cultural logic, whereby consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections between dispersed media content. The term, participatory culture, is intended to contrast with older notions of media spectatorship. In this emerging media system, what might traditionally be understood as media producers and consumers are transformed into participants who are expected to interact with each other according to a new set of rules which none of us fully understands. Convergence does not occur through media appliances - however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers. Yet, each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information we have extracted from the ongoing flow of media around us and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.

Basically people working/collaborating on something together e.g. wikipedia

In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media content Consumption has become a collective process and that's what I mean in this book by collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.... Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day to day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using collective power through our recreational life, but it has implications at all levels of our culture. In this book, I will explore how the play of collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate.

Basically the sharing of our knowledge.

As you can see there are strong links to be made here with the work of David Gauntlett on Web 2.0 (his notion of collaboration - for the greater good??)

Reinventing Cinema

Reinventing Cinema: An Interview with Chuck Tryon (Part One) Chuck Tryon is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Fayetteville State University, where his teaching and research has focused on various aspects of film, television, and convergent media, including digital cinema, documentary studies, political video, and on using technology in the language arts classroom.

Read the whole article here: http://henryjenkins.org/2010/07/throughout_the_book_you_addres.html

Below i have taken what i believe to be the key points.

"what happens when these tools become democratized so that "anyone" has access to tools that allow them to make professional-quality films?"

"Within the broader film industry, I think the response has been a perpetual cycle of adjustment and innovation. Studios have succeeded by promoting new films in terms of spectacle and visual novelty, as we saw with the success of James Cameron's Avatar and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, while also seeking to exploit all of the new platforms where films can be viewed."

"Mark Gill, a former president of Miramax, worried that digital cinema was leading to a glut of "flat-out awful" films competing for limited screen space, while adding that social media tools have the potential to sabotage a studio's marketing efforts, arguing that in an age of texting, "good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster."

"others including indie film producer Ted Hope, have celebrated the democratizing potential of digital tools by defining cinema as an experience. Some studios and entertainment journalists have expressed concern about the power of social media in spreading "bad buzz" about a film. In particular, there was a brief discussion of a "Twitter effect" that was helping to amplify negative word-of-mouth about some poorly-performing films. But for the most part, there seems to be widespread acceptance of the role of social media in shaping how audiences consume films."

When discussing the future of the film industry

" think there are a number of continuities between past and present. After all, movie theaters still play a vital cultural role, with teens and young adults continuing to see movies in significant numbers. The excitement over the Twilight films, to focus on the most recent example, shows that audiences still crave the opportunity to share in a significant experience with a wider moviegoing public."

"we will continue to see the window of time between the theatrical debut and the DVD (or streaming video) release of a movie, with the dual hope of curtailing piracy and of increasing DVD sales. Within a few years, Hollywood films may even follow the logic of many independent filmmakers in releasing their films available theatrically and online simultaneously. DVD sales will likely continue to decline as consumers become more selective about the movies they buy, in part due to the cheap availability of streaming video. And we will continue to see cases of filmmakers and studios experimenting with versions of transmedia storytelling. We will see occasional cases of crowdsourced or crowdfunded films break through into theatrical distribution, even if those instances are relatively rare. And this is probably obvious, but I think we will continue to see an incredibly vibrant fan culture expressed via blogs, YouTube, and other social media tools."

Discussing why filmmakers are making more bold and elaborate films (Alice in Wonderland, Avatar - using the medium of 3D)............

"With DVD sales declining, studios seemed to be embracing 3D as a means of attracting audiences back into the theater, and a number of high-profile directors, including James Cameron, saw 3D as potentially offering deeper immersion into cinematic narrative."

"Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was converted to 3D in post-production, to find a wider-than-expected audience."

"More recently, however, there appears to a critical and audience backlash developing against 3D, especially for "fake 3D" movies such as Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender that were converted to 3D in post-production, a backlash that was exacerbated when a number of theaters significantly increased ticket prices for 3D films, making it more expensive for a family of four to go out for a night at the movies."

Henry Jenkins's Web Blog

James Ward found an extremely useful resource

http://www.henryjenkins.org/index.html

Here you will find lots of information, theory and contemporary examples posted by Henry Jenkins himself.

Breakdown of Movie Making in the digital age

In “ Movie-making in the new media age”, particular attention is paid to digital film or DV and its relevance to the internet (this being the digital distribution, production and consumption of digital film on the internet). With respect to Roberts, his article was written prior to the opening of YouTube (in 2006), that has to some extent seen the manifestation of this predicament by Kim Howells:

"One of the most interesting aspects of digital technology is the possibilities it presents. Films could be seen at the same time all over the world, in different types of venue or in places where there is no easy access to cinema at present. "
(Department for Culture Media and Sport, 2002: 3)

This also ties into user-generated content and the issue of distribution and copyright. In the case of distribution, the advent of the DVD and its “extra features” utility did bring a deeper dimension to the film experience in terms of interactivity and supporting features (“documentaries, director profiles” etc). For example we can see this most clearly on another film Roberts quotes later, that being Time Code (2000). It was a movie filmed on DV with four hand held cameras in one long shot, with four narratives running simultaneously on a quartered screen. Throughout the film, we are led indirectly (through lighting, sound, camera composition and screen juxtaposition etc) to pay attention to a certain screen at a certain time. Nevertheless, if one watches the DVD version, the interactive element gives the viewer control over what screen he/she wishes to watch. In effect, by giving the viewer/user more control over the content, it changes how they experience the film with less linear emphasis on the plot that the original tried to create.

When this distributive utility is applied to the web, Roberts complains that even after the “Napsterization” of video into online file sharing format, it took him 5 hours to download Martin Scorese’s “Casino”. Today it would take you less than 20 minutes (“legalized”) and in a few years to come, with the replacement of broadband, it will take less than a nanosecond, as our experiences of “download times” (and physical distribution of film itself) become mere artifacts of nostalgia.

When we consider the web in relation to digital film production, the case of “The Blair Witch Project”(1999) stands out with its innovative use of viral marketing and small budget hand held DV cameras. We are reminded that the web provides a wealth of resources to the independent film maker, in terms of community and technical help on the movie industry (we could link David Gauntlet’s theory of collaboration and Henry Jenkins’s notion of a participatory culture here). Even so, Roberts urges caution in regard to the possibilities of digital technology as a substitute to the craft of film making itself (digital or not), as good film-making still requires “talent, inspiration, knowledge, expertise and skills”. Or as Hitchcock had put it: “a great script, a great script and a great script”. (think about the documentary “capturing avatar” and what Henry Jenkins would describe as the blending of old and new media to create a different consumer experience)

Information taken and adapted from "Writing in the Digital Age"

Chris Anderson playlist - The Long Tail, Music Industry, business models

This playlist should give you over an hour's worth of Chris Anderson's ideas:

People to Follow on Twitter and Why

So who is worth following for A level Media? According to Pete Fraser:

@julianmcdougall wrote the OCR textbook and he tends to use his tweets to send out useful links for the A2 exam in particular

@henryjenkins is the American academic who wrote 'Convergence Culture' and has done a lot of research on fans

@ainnucci Armando Iannucci the creator of 'The Thick of It' and Alan Partridge, amongst much more, is always amusing and interesting

@davidschneider is a comedian, who has worked with Iannucci and is a prolific tweeter and retweeter of funny and satirical stuff

@cmdiploma is me Pete Fraser - I don't say much but you might find other people I follow quite interesting!

"Get yourself on there, add a few people then have a hunt around for comedians, actors, film-makers, politicians, journalists you find interesting. It could open you up to a whole load of interesting stuff!" (Pete Fraser - Chief Examiner)


Al notes that Pete's Twitter profile image is borrowed from Two Tone Records, the UK ska revival label 1979-1985.

Music 2.0

Connect or Die: How to survive in a Music 2.0 world

View more presentations from Marta Kagan.