In response to Fei's Understanding Media: The extension of Man

I agree with Yifei that the definition of hot and cold media given by McLuhan is ambiguous.
McLuhan has distinguished hot and cold media with two charecterstics:
1) Level of Definition
2) Participation of audience

I think 'level of definition' is no longer a valid characteristic because now almost all mediums can cater relatively high level of definitions. It is up to the creator to decide how much information should be provided and how much should be left for the audience to fill in.

Level of participation is surely a valid charecterstic in defining hot and cold media.

I like the part where McLuhan says poets were far ahead of Newton in their response to the challenge of the clock. If we look back in history, all what we have now was thought up by some poet at some time. These creative souls(poets, artists, musicians, writers etc.) think up the future which is later implemented by scientists and engineers.

In response to Mauri's E-Learning

"Downes argues that online learning no one involves a medium, but instead a platform. I would say that in the Web 2.0 there are lots of what can be called platforms, but such are just a special kind of interactive media."
Mauri


In a bigger picture he is talking about removing the middle man and to enable direct relationship. Right now the middle man, medium, is responsible to transmit information between producer and consumer. With the idea of prosumer the middle man is not required. In student centered learning the typical learning hierarchy is turned upside down and the student is given a charge of his own learning. The term medium in my view is used by Downes to represent the middle man composing, organizing, packaging and finally delivering the content.

The platform he discusses will surely be a special kind of interactive media. Here the communication will be between the student (user) and technology. And an Interactive media designer would design self learning middleman to channel information from technology to the user (human).

Mutability of New Media

Term 'mutable' is used in context of new media as objects that can be mutated, that is, changed.
Because new media can be broken down to bits and bytes it is easy to play around with existing object and create new ones out of it. Lev Manovich refers to this as variability.

While writing about the article "Quality of experience" i wondered what Mutable means.

http://imd-nash.blogspot.com/2009/08/quality-of-experience.html

The Language of New Media

Lev Manovich’s attempt to record the emergence of new media before it is lost. He draws various analogies between new media and the cinema (new media for 21st century)
While cinema was emerging and taking shape no one recorded the development as it happened year by year and all what we were left with was newspaper report, diaries of cinema’s inventors and other bits and pieces. Historians had to reconstruct ‘How cinema evolved’ painstakingly.

One significant difference that he draws between new media and old is that new media is build up of discreet blocks where as old media was continuous. Cinema sampled time (24 frames in one second) and new media samples both time and space.
This sampling in my view restricts the resolution of both space and time. The plus point is that this modular approach makes it easy to re-use the discreet objects. But it looses the details.
Then again brain cannot register frame rate faster then 24 per second. So why bother increasing the frame rate when the mind will eventually skip those minute fragments of time.
Talking about space, vector drawing can be zoomed in without loosing the sharpness but that is not true with raster objects where pixels get muddy if you zoom in.

Because we are so used to discreet approach now it is hard to turn back and start again using continuous spectrum. But that is just my thought.

Media and Economy

Video Remix,

30 Sec video advertisements

Corporate companies can put up competitions to make video advertisement for their brands. Users will be given set of characters and sceneries which they can choose from. Ad with most number of views and good aesthetics will be chosen by the company for TV and other media.

Dilemma of 3d animation is that many creative people have ideas in their heads but can’t put them to work because they lack basic skills. Even if you are skilled it is well known that drawing characters and then animating them takes a lot of time and effort.

The aim of video remix is to provide users with pre-made characters, props and environments, where they can use their own creativity and storylines to create short movies. Many of the advanced options will only be available to registered paid users.

Actors will have the following changeable properties
 Actions
 Postures
 Dialogue

Camera Angles, Three basic cameras will be provided. This will be a long shot where once user has decided upon the script movie produced won’t be editable on the software.

Soundtrack of different genre would be provided like fast paced action, slow drama or romance to create a scenario.
User can play around with the actors and the environment. It is very much like recording of video games but because users will have their own story lines its going to be their own video.

Some sort of easy to learn scripting language can be used for animation. Final product would be rendered put up for viewing in the video gallery.

Earning can be done from corporate brands where the pay to get their ads made by the users. Top 3 ads will be the property of the brand and the creators would be given royalty for that. We will charge nominal fee from the brands. Though users will be provided with number of characters and props they can also register and buy new characters and props. Same way artists can put up their models for sale. We will charge a nominal fee on every sale.

A forum will be available for discussion various issues regarding ad making.

Made by Yngwie, Naseh and Ali

Self Organizing Systems

Self organizing systems produce themselves. It’s a system that reproduces itself with the help of its own internal logic and components. Each new iteration is more stable than the previous one and on a higher level.

Self organizing occurs in complex systems. These systems are distributed and have a border that separates them from their environment. An important point to note is that it is difficult to model complex systems and predict their behavior and exactly the reason why it is not possible to predict the order of the system after self organization.

These systems have control parameters and when these parameters reach a certain critical value the system enters into a critical instable state. This is when the local disturbance inside the system intensifies and initiates the organization. When the system reaches critical state one knows that the overall system will be transformed but one doesn’t know the exact direction and form of change. The phase transition from stability to instability is call bifurcation point. This is when the system has multiple alternative development paths in front and it has to make a selection. New qualities in self organizing system emerge in this critical phase.

Once the system is outside critical stage and new order has emerged it is stable to the local disturbances. The structure is fundamentally changed.


Reference:
Internet and Society, Social Theory in the Information Age by Christian Fuchs

In response to Kamil Kozuchs eighth reading

The view of hacker managing time in his own way is not applicable in todays fast pace life. In this age of technology where information is abundantly available, at least quantitatively, time management is very important. We certainly don't have the leisure of working when we want to work. There are deadlines to be met. Time is money.