It seems that most often as I am barely starting to read something it instantly brings up examples of other things I've stumbled across the net. This was the case with every article I read today. First there was Todd Kappelman’s Overview: “Marshall McLuhan: ‘The Medium is the Message’" which just reminded me of a favorite topic I tend to enjoy philosophizing about - the downsides of innovation, or in other words the disadvantage of having technology constantly improve. I know this may come off sounding a bit odd from someone who's openly a computer geek of the n-th degree but I'm often caught saying: "Technology, gotta love hating it!" I can vividly remember the time when my family first moved to the States and I had ICQ to keep in touch with friends from Bulgaria. It was a wonderful way to stay connected but before I knew it it had also become my primary method of communicating with friends from my current village as well, including the kid next door. I thought to myself, how sad is it that I could just walk over and knock on his door and we could both enjoy the outdoors and instead we're sitting in our homes in front of the computer screen exchanging instant messages.
Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man was interesting to read primarily because of the definition of hot & cold media and the "high" vs "low" definition content. Here I caught myself thinking of videogames recently relying too much on their "high definition" (and note I'm not just talking about the resolution they crank out, I'm referring to the visual richness they offer) and sacrificing on value, playability and so on in favor of providing "eye candy" ... It's easy for someone to get carried away and miss out important basics during the creation of something "hot."
Bolter & Grusin, Remediation (sorry, it's a PDF so no link) deals with the present and future of media using examples from the movie Stange Days. I can't help but feel that their comparison between old media & new media and how each plays off the other will become a thing of the past once ALL media gradually fuses. Mozilla Labs, the team that brought Firefox to the browser world has some amazing rendetions of what the future looks like in a series of concept videos. The project's called Aurora and if you have a bit of time to see how they merge things it'll probably demonstrate how computer usage in the future to access different kinds of media will no longer be as restricted as it has been. In fact on that same website they look at Ubiquity, tool that is already getting pretty smart at what people may wish to do with data presented on their screen. Seeing how this is my first post and I'm not quite sure how long of a rant I should put on the web I will cut things... for now... but rest assured, more media analysis with regards to past, present and future will appear here.
Bolter & Grusin, Remediation (sorry, it's a PDF so no link) deals with the present and future of media using examples from the movie Stange Days. I can't help but feel that their comparison between old media & new media and how each plays off the other will become a thing of the past once ALL media gradually fuses. Mozilla Labs, the team that brought Firefox to the browser world has some amazing rendetions of what the future looks like in a series of concept videos. The project's called Aurora and if you have a bit of time to see how they merge things it'll probably demonstrate how computer usage in the future to access different kinds of media will no longer be as restricted as it has been. In fact on that same website they look at Ubiquity, tool that is already getting pretty smart at what people may wish to do with data presented on their screen. Seeing how this is my first post and I'm not quite sure how long of a rant I should put on the web I will cut things... for now... but rest assured, more media analysis with regards to past, present and future will appear here.
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