The Missing Part, Long Overdue

For my class presentation at the beginning of the quarter, I presented about Hollywood Dropouts and their online show called "Villans the Series." The other production group I wanted to show was Wong Fu Productions.

I'll let this video clip do the talking, but the key points related to the course to pay attention to is the concept of the "long tail" and how the internet gives a whole new playing field/participatory culture.

Twitter as a News Source

Incorporating what we have discussed in the past week, I have decided to post about how Twitter now serves as a mainstream news feed for a lot of people. Any major new source has a twitter page and post daily tweets about the top stories of the day. This allows people to quickly search through headlines while doing their daily twitter browsing. The news source will either give a quick summary of the story on twitter and/or just link the post to their own site. This is definitely a new and efficient way of receiving and delivering news. It also allows users to customize who they are getting their news from. People can follow multiple topics/interest through twitter, and it is all delivered on one page with daily updates. Here is an article that shows the top 100 news feeds for twitter.

Final

Final Exam

DMST 2200

Choose 2 of the following essay 3 questions. Your answers should be 2-4 single-spaced pages each and should be written in essay form with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion. Please make your answers interesting, well written and full of examples and references to the course readings that demonstrate that you have a nuanced view of what is going on in the digital media landscape. Also please write a short answer to the question about Free! Please email your completed exam PASTED INTO THE BODY OF AN EMAIL WITH YOU NAME ON THE TOP to me at adrienne.russell@du.edu by NOON Monday Nov. 23. If you don’t hear back from me by 1pm send it again. There will be no late exams excepted.

1. Digital tools and networks provide opportunities for amateur cultural production and distribution, for politicians and corporations to have more direct contact with the public, and for them to leverage the public in generating content and support. And some say power dynamics are changing among corporations, politicians, experts, professional and everyday people. Please write an essay discussing the implications of new media tools (and values) and these changing power dynamics in the last presidential campaign, using specific examples of how new media is being used in the campaigns by politicians and their supporters to illustrate your argument. Extra credit if you reference and discuss the 3 ways described by Joe Trippi, on the Web 2.0 panel, that digital networks helped the Obama campaign.

2. Please watch this video “an open letter to all the Rosie O’Donnells” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJCkHu3trKc and read and watch the material related to it. Write an essay about convergent culture, using this as an example to first illustrate and second challenge and/or support the notion of convergent culture as a frame through which to view the contemporary media environment. Include in your essay a discussion of the intersection of commercial and do-it-yourself media products.

3. The scholars and journalists we have read, watched and discussed in this course have presented various views of the future of digital media (and therefore of our future in general). Discuss some of these different views, their strengths and weaknesses, and finally your own informed opinion about the future of digital media and how it is changing how we socialize, produce and exchange culture and become informed about the world around us. Please specifically address the ideas of the personal panopticon, collective intelligence, the long tail, convergence, social networking and Free! in your answer.

Everyone please answer this question about Free!

Why are so many things becoming free? Please provide examples of the various ways companies make money by giving things away?

Questions We Wanted to Answer

Is digital media changing our capacity to remember things, listen, focus...
ie how is it changing the way we think?

How will the internet evolve?

What does digital media do to notions of copyright ownership and appropriation.

How do we know what is true?

Is the human race collectively becoming an ultimate being?

How is new media changing our relations to one another?

Is it good or bad?

Does the internet propel globalization? If so how?

Future Internet

I've noticed a lot lately the internet shifting to inform the public of the proposed future of the internet. First the Bing commercials on TV seem to promote the "decision engines" especially designed for easier and simpler web searches. However I personally do not see the difference between this new search engine and any of the others available on the internet. Although the commercials promise simplicity and less clutter. And then there are the new Yahoo commercials which center around the idea of the new yahoo being all about "you." I find these commercials interesting because now the internet is at the stage where it is fully accepting and promoting the idea of personalization and collective intelligence. I feel that until now the phenomenon with web 2.0 and collective intelligence was known by only those that actually participated in it and now there is large promotion and spreading of it. It is all exciting and promising for the future of the internet.

News/Iphone

As I was brainstorming more alternative sources of news, I thought of something that was right in front of my face, and that is my iphone. On my iphone, I have downloaded applications that allow me to get notifications from news sources as text messages so I am able to keep up to date with the news. Then, that made me think of the DU account. I cannot remember the name, but i'm sure we all get those text messages of news on campus like when school is cancelled or something has happened. This again is another source of alternative news the school uses to get important things out to the students. All of this shows the convergence of media, that I am able to get alerts through text messages from news websites about important updates in the world.

List of 50 Social News Websites

As I am not an avid user of reading alternative news websites, like shelby said, everyone took any that I did know of. So instead here is a list of 50 social news websites. A lot of them are ones that we have already talked about in class like digg. Online grants people all types of news stories for their desire. One that no one really mentioned is Perezhilton.com . Even though it is mainly a celebrity news website, he does always add important news information that is going on. I every so often find a story that is really intriguing or interesting that I do not even find on a regular news site.