New Media Reader, pp. 441-513

I'm glad that the New Media Reader featured the excerpt from Ted Nelson's Literary Machines, because it really gave a better sense of his Xanadu project.  Xanadu is the ultimate archive, highlighting the importance of public connections from any moment within a network's history.  I suppose that's what the internet is like today, although Nelson really seemed on top of this before we were even ready for it.  He made the internet seem like a mode for digital time travel, moving through the network to any digitally documented point in "time."  His ideas provided a precursor for so many aspects of the internet, maybe even Google and Wikipedia which just about everyone with an internet connection uses every day.

After watching the video about Bill Viola in class, it was great to learn a bit more about him through his own writing.  As a filmmaker, it was fascinating to learn how he played with time and speed for his Venice project.  The video art medium is so interesting and relatively new.  Viola seems to fit right in with Nam June Paik and Les Levine as an important innovator of the field.  I am curious to learn more about his "70 millimeter" video art, as well as his work with music videos.  

Ben Bagdikian taught me a lot about Media Monopolies.  It was so interesting to follow the fifty corporations dominating media in 1983 to six dominant corporations in 2000.  I felt a personal connection to the history, as my father was working as an animator for DIC at the time of the Disney-ABC deal and felt the full wait of this cut-back merger.  I also worked at Focus Features from May 2006 until June 2008, and since General Electric owns NBC Universal which owns Focus features, it was nice to see General Electric on top, at least eight years ago.  I know they are struggling a bit now, but who isn't?

Ben Shneiderman makes interesting points in his article about Direct Manipulation, graphical user interfaces (like Photoshop), visual programming environments, etc.  I'm not sure who Jonathan Swift is but I certainly did not know about his project to eliminate words from language.  Yeah, good luck with that.  Shneiderman addresses how the direct manipulation of data could allow for immediate visual feedback.  I had not realized that the Macintosh was first released in 1984, two years before I was born.  I just remember a rectangular prism Mac which we may actually still have that seemed so exciting when I was a child.  Now I'm blogging about it on my MacBook Pro…  It was funny to think about how initial MP3 players looked like discmans just as early cars had fake horses heads on them, all to make the transitions easier.  

It was really interesting to read about the study of psychoanalysis in relation to gaming.  Games today like Second Life allow users to fill different roles that they may normally in their REAL daily lives, playing new social and psychological "roles that are important to them psychologically."  Since the early 1980s, video games have become a major popular culture force.  MUDs (multi-user dungeon, domain, dimension) allow players to tinker with various aspects of self, and in more recent games users can even design and alter their surroundings.  Games like Gears of War 2 have intricately planned narratives that accompany the game.  I also feel like Dungeons and Dragons is a precursor to games like World of Warcraft, creating a sense of community between players as seen in Felicia Day's webseries The Guild.