The End?

Well, this is it. The end of our scholastic year. I've learned some things in this class, but if I was to pick one to write about, it would be that we all, with the proper application of blood, sweat, and time, can participate in the collective group discussion occurring on the internet. I wasn't the most prolific or the most concise, but these blog posts gave me a real chance to express myself in a way that probably taught myself more about me than the state of the blogosphere.


If I have one regret, it was the lack of interesting (to me) topics to post about. If only I had been able to comment on an ongoing presidential election year or some such thing, I believe it would have been a great opportunity to show my aptitudes.


If you've been reading my blog, or even just bits of it, I appreciate your time, and hope that you'll keep following. Who knows? We're just a few months away from the Primaries ramping up. It'll be an interesting trip.

Foreign Movies - Realm of the Stuck Up

Man, foreign movies, what a topic.

Really, foreign movies aren't an more original or interesting than domestic films, but the ones that manage to translate and become popular are usually the cream of the crop. This results in a skewed perception by movie critics. No films made in France aren't any better because they're made in France, they just happen to be one of the better films out of that country.

That said. There are quite a few films made outside the Anglo-Western English sphere. I've only had an opportunity to see a few. For some reason, American film goers really hate subtitles. I mean, I even heard rumbles of people complaining about Avatar which translated the Native American parallels' tongue into English. Really? Did you just want them to speak English?

Anyways, here a few foreign flicks I've had the pleasure of checking out:

Metropolis
Run Lola Run (Great for getting into foreign films)

22 Bullets
Let the Right One In
Shaolin Soccer
Kung Fu Hustle (One of my all time favorites)

Ong Bak

Hobo With a Shotgun

And quite a few more. I'm one of those self styled movie buffs.

2012 Republican Primaries

Check out these statistics gathered by ohmygov! It's quite obvious that Social Media is intrinsically tied with politics. It is a whole other thing to see the actual numbers.

FACEBOOK FANS

1) Sarah Palin	2,761,054
2) Mitt Romney	793,127
3) Mike Huckabee	535,011
4) Ron Paul	302,299
5) Bobby Jindal	122,389
6) Newt Gingrich	107,046
7) Michele Bachmann	97,755
8) Tim Pawlenty	71,841
9) Rick Perry	51,839
10) Mitch Daniels	42,300
11) Chris Christie	32,456
12) Haley Barbour	17,290
13) Rick Santorum	12,987

TWITTER FOLLOWERS

1) Newt Gingrich	1,309,037
2) Sarah Palin	422,884
3) Mike Huckabee	129,320
4) Bobby Jindal	55,983
5) Michele Bachmann	35,688
6) Ron Paul	31,539
7) Chris Christie	28,564
8) Tim Pawlenty	25,856
9) Haley Barbour	11,444
10) Michael Steele	8,738
11) Rick Perry	5,686
12) Mitch Daniels	1,978

I've been meaning to post about this particular video for a long time.

Health Reform Explained Video

This is it folks. This is a video that takes a complex, controversial issue, and then calmly explains the idea with neutrality and clarity. This is the pinnacle of what 'English for New Media' is all about.

Recalling Reading

Behold, the fruit of my (and Dan's) labour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-Q1SX-gfes&feature=youtube_gdata

Twitter

If you can't send a message in one hundred-and-forty characters it probably isn't worth sending. Excuse me while I write an essay on this topic.

Follow @juantoniovaldez

Powerpuff Girls!

The most vivid childhood show I remember was the PowerPuff girls.

Feminist, catchy, and with some of the most creative villains I've ever seen! How can you say no?

Early Film

The first film I remember viewing (though it certainly wasn't the first) was The Jungle Book.


Masterly crafted, filled with classic Disney characters, classic Disney story, and classic Disney racism. Good times.

Baby Films

Trailers were originally meant to advertise films. But more and more, trailers are becoming well composed. They have their own beginning, rising actions, climax, heroes, etc.. The lines start to blend between film and the trailer for that film. Especially with the unfortunate trend of showing "the best parts" becoming more and more prevalent.


Take a look a few of these.


Super 8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfdYeGAjQH4


Super: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctcURFb7XE4&feature=player_embedded


Four Lions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI


Video games have the trend of making trailers that don't show footage from the game at all. Instead, they use pre-rendered (out of game) footage to lure in potential buyers. But sometimes, you get some really beautiful and unique trailers.


Dante's Inferno: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rbeAGdYk_0


<Warning graphic trailer involving children and zombies. 18+ only>


This Dead Island trailer is especially poignant. There is hardly any actual game footage, and the game hasn't even finished development, but the moment I saw this, I was sold. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg


With the budget for most of these trailers in the millions, are they really just advertising? Film takes many forms, and maybe the one we least expect is right in front of us.

Video of Japan Earth Breaking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LPGzzaSsbU

This is surreal, and without the reach of modern communications, we would not get a chance to witness this.

Japan Before/After

An excellent article by ABC News showing the before and after of some areas destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm

The article contains still images of residential and industrial areas before the waves of water destroyed them, and uses a plug-in of some sort that allows the viewer to control how much of the image is pre-disaster. It creates a feeling of interactivity and brings additional empathy to an already terrible event.

Dangerous Rhetoric Enabling

One of the more interesting side effects of the digital age is the increases in political advertisements. Anybody with enough time and some photoshop skills can whip up a campaign poster. Through in some Windows Movie Maker and you got yourself a TV-ready advertisement.

Along with self-promotion and easier distribution comes the attack advertisements. With ridiculously fast information dispersal, any fact can be twisted and manipulated into a video, slapped on the advertising circuit, and be live within a few hours.

Take this ad for example.

Pretty shady of that politician right?

Well, not really. His aide made a phone call while in the town car they were riding in. The number for the sex line is only a few digits away from the Department of Criminal Justice's. The call was terminated in under 60 seconds, and the DoCJ was called a few minutes later.

Nonetheless, the attack ad was run, and technically, everything the ad talks about is true, so it wasn't slanderous. This ad ran on local television stations. Broadcast television is typically targeted towards a lower class market, and in this case, hopefully a market that won't bother fact checking their political ads.

Newspaper vs Online News

I am examining the differences between the print version of the Argus Leader and the webpage of the newspaper.

The first thing that comes to mind is the tactile sensations that are created by holding the physical newspaper. It is a sensation fraught with nostalgia. Books have been a large part of my life, but it seems the older I get, the less I have a chance to hold them. Compared to the instant gratification and graphics of the internet, paper print seems like old haps. Maybe then, this is the reason that the newspaper refuses to be put out of it's misery. The older demographics cannot let go of a day gone by. Holding the paper is the literary equivalent of a safety blanket for them, it's comforting, it's warm, but it isn't really useful at all. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone pre-30's who read their local paper. And why would they? Who wants to read what some over paid editor has to say when I can listen to all my friends' and family's opinions?

The second, and most obvious thing when it comes to digital newspaper is space. The physical copy of the paper is forced by budget and size constraints, and looks very... unprofessional? The website, cradled softly by my large monitor looks neat and proper, ready to be let open the gates of knowledge, but only if you want it to. Compared to the physical paper which looks like a messy, dirty, unorganized slop of useless garbage, ever ready to belch forth whatever happened to be most important to the editor that day. Though they are sending the same message, and in fact, usually contain the same stories, the physical newspaper seems a filthy relic of a bygone age, while the digital paper is a clean alternative to those archaic rags.

Newspapers

To me, Newspapers are a dying media.

They seem to be an outdated form of communicating a message, and in the modern day, one that only targets the populace that is too grumpy to use modern medias. The simple fact is that blogs and the internet are beating newspapers without even trying to. Why would I read some stuffy journalists' opinion on the current state of affairs when I could read a Harvard graduate's thesis on the issue?

Papers that I remember:
Argus Leader - father worked there
Madison Daily - read it once

I have an interesting relationship with the Argus Leader. I grew up with my father working there. He sold ad space to business in the local area. On 'Take Your Child To Work' days I would be hustled around the office, looking at all the various workspace, but by far the most impressive thing is the massive printing presses. Our family has numerous friends that still work in the Argus, and the fact that their jobs' time is numbered.

IPv4 Addresses running out

I am interested to see the effect that IPv4 exhaustion has on the state of social medias.


Here is a quote from Vint Cerf.
"Eventually there will be no more IPv4 'public address space,'" he continued. "When that exhaustion occurs (and it won't happen in a uniform way—some places will run out before others), then there will be some devices that only have IPv6 assignments. They will not be able to directly interact with IPV4-only devices."


How will this change the state of social medias? Will some devices be favored over others? What if those devices align themselves with a certain service. Imagine if all phones came packaged with a deal on Facebook, preventing you from using Twitter, blogging software, etc... but allowing unlimited access with Fbook.

Video Project

In this project I used a screen cap program to film me writing out "English for New Media" in paint.

Embedding Video

Here's me trying to embed a youtube video in Blogger.

Applying Media To English

Apparently, the goal for this class in taking standard English practices and creations, then applying those doctrines to modern medias.

We'll see how this works out.