Media Living: Cellphones are daaaangerous!
Oct. 1st, 2008 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wordwhackerMy parents went to the Elton John concert last night. I would have loved to go but tickets were both expensive as hell and nigh impossible to get. So I was sitting at home listening to his greatest hits on the stereo when I get a call on my cell phone from my MUM's cell phone. At first it was just garbled bits of sound, but then it resolved into Elton John's voice singing "Tiny Dancer." The sound quality was mostly terrible; the piano (which I could only hear for part of the time) sounded like a mangled child's toy some of the time, thanks to the tiny microphone in the phone being TOTALLY blown out with the volume (and the speaker in my own phone isn't exactly audio magic itself.) But I could hear his voice well enough to make out the lyrics and the melody. So I stood by my front door and lip-synched to one of my favourite songs in the world, which was being sung live by Sir Elton himself, right here in Saint John, and bounced from mum's cell phone up to a satellite and down again to mine, about a kilometre and a half away.
I thought that was a pretty cool digital media experience.
My parents were telling me that there were signs up everywhere saying not to bring recording equipment or cameras to the show. But god, what's a cell phone now WITHOUT a camera? And I'm not too "up" on cell technology but if they're becoming mp3 players as well it seems to me that recording technology will be standard issue soon, too. So what are you supposed to do? Take away peoples' cell phones? That would probably be an exercise in complete madness.
Of course, hearing garbled music on my cell phone or getting a fuzzy picture in the dim lights isn't exactly a threat to the recording industry (unlike those evil, eeeevil downloaders!). But I can't help but wonder what'll happen once the technology gets better - at some point in the near-ish future we probably WILL be able to make decent-quality recordings with something the size of a cell phone (maybe that's PART of a cell phone). Would capturing a song that way be "bootlegging"? How about a whole set? If I'd been able to hear his songs clearly, would I have been violating a boundary of some kind (and if so, would it be copyright? privacy? something else?)
I had a paper due on Tuesday which I'd picked away at over the weekend, but I had the bulk of actual pen-to-paper-style writing left to do on Monday. I decided to stay away from the distractions of home and write it long-hand, which is a good approach for me. There's something about scrawling barely-legible (to anyone else, anyway) ink all over the place, scratching things out, drawing arrows to things, and generally filling the margins to the brim that I really enjoy, and find conducive to a first draft. (Editing is DEFINITELY a computer thing for me, though. I tend to edit a lot even as I transcribe what I've written.) This goes for fiction, too.
What's strange is that I actually started writing on a regular-ish basis only once my family got a computer, and more specifically, the internet. The impetus was a Star Wars-themed interactive story - sort of like a community-based, DIY "choose your own adventure" fan story. This was my first internet community and I made some friends there that I STILL talk to today, if you believe it (this was about 11 years ago now!) So for me, writing really got started as a community-oriented thing - you post new chapters, you get a bit of a friendly "fan" base while you started to appreciate other peoples' writing and chat with everybody on the forums. It's been a long while since I participated very heavily in an online community of any kind (except for NaNo, though I haven't been very forum-active for the past few years.) This used to be practically ALL I did online, though - now I have a little routine of things that I do and places I go, and I hardly ever venture outside of those dozen-ish sites. I use the internet for much different stuff these days, too - school stuff, webcomics, updating/checking friends' blogs, research. Does this have anything to do with my inability to do academic and/or fiction-type writing on the computer? No idea. Will have to think about that.
There's this commercial that I keep seeing on TV for hockey. Makes sense, since the season's just getting started. Anyway, the whole thing is basically talking about the season as a narrative. I can't remember exactly what the narrator says, but she talks about how it's a story that plays out - the wins, the losses, the injuries, the individual success stories. I'm not a big sports fan, though I'm sort of one by proxy, I guess - my dad is WAY into the sports, and watching them with him is fun because he'll explain exactly why X situation/action/screw-up is so interesting/such a heartbreak/etc. It's a special kind of grammar that sits within what you might call a narrative structure of the "season" - pre-season hopes, the ramping-up for the early season and race for the playoffs. And then the playoffs of course - the climax, the losers, the winners, men jumping around like little kids and slapping each other's asses in a TOTALLY NON-GAY WAY. Anyway, it was kind of cool to see a commercial that was pretty much overtly talking about sports as a kind of cultural text.
I found the game "Shadow of the Colossus" for ten bucks, which is awesome, because I've been looking for it FOREVER. Our unofficial title for this game is "Horse and Guy" because about 70% of it is you (scrawny hero) riding around the totally empty countryside on your horse. The graphics are great because they give you a really good sense of SCALE. When you stand on the edge of a cliff and look off into the distance you can appreciate the amount of SPACE there. Space that you have to cross, incidentally.
So you wander and you wander and you climb on things and, generally, feel kind of bored. All the better for when you suddenly are confronted with a GIANT FREAKING MONSTER that you have to somehow kill. Once again, scale really increases the "OH SHIT!" factor here. Your scrawny character has to climb up this behemoth, clinging for his life while it tries to shake him off, and find weak points so that you can stab it to death. And this would be cool and fun on its own, but the general quiet beautiful boringness of the quest to GET to the colossus is what makes it. It goes from "fun" to "epic". It's really good game construction - one which is sensitive to pacing, and which effectively keys into the right elements to make it an authentic-feeling experience.
I thought that was a pretty cool digital media experience.
My parents were telling me that there were signs up everywhere saying not to bring recording equipment or cameras to the show. But god, what's a cell phone now WITHOUT a camera? And I'm not too "up" on cell technology but if they're becoming mp3 players as well it seems to me that recording technology will be standard issue soon, too. So what are you supposed to do? Take away peoples' cell phones? That would probably be an exercise in complete madness.
Of course, hearing garbled music on my cell phone or getting a fuzzy picture in the dim lights isn't exactly a threat to the recording industry (unlike those evil, eeeevil downloaders!). But I can't help but wonder what'll happen once the technology gets better - at some point in the near-ish future we probably WILL be able to make decent-quality recordings with something the size of a cell phone (maybe that's PART of a cell phone). Would capturing a song that way be "bootlegging"? How about a whole set? If I'd been able to hear his songs clearly, would I have been violating a boundary of some kind (and if so, would it be copyright? privacy? something else?)
I had a paper due on Tuesday which I'd picked away at over the weekend, but I had the bulk of actual pen-to-paper-style writing left to do on Monday. I decided to stay away from the distractions of home and write it long-hand, which is a good approach for me. There's something about scrawling barely-legible (to anyone else, anyway) ink all over the place, scratching things out, drawing arrows to things, and generally filling the margins to the brim that I really enjoy, and find conducive to a first draft. (Editing is DEFINITELY a computer thing for me, though. I tend to edit a lot even as I transcribe what I've written.) This goes for fiction, too.
What's strange is that I actually started writing on a regular-ish basis only once my family got a computer, and more specifically, the internet. The impetus was a Star Wars-themed interactive story - sort of like a community-based, DIY "choose your own adventure" fan story. This was my first internet community and I made some friends there that I STILL talk to today, if you believe it (this was about 11 years ago now!) So for me, writing really got started as a community-oriented thing - you post new chapters, you get a bit of a friendly "fan" base while you started to appreciate other peoples' writing and chat with everybody on the forums. It's been a long while since I participated very heavily in an online community of any kind (except for NaNo, though I haven't been very forum-active for the past few years.) This used to be practically ALL I did online, though - now I have a little routine of things that I do and places I go, and I hardly ever venture outside of those dozen-ish sites. I use the internet for much different stuff these days, too - school stuff, webcomics, updating/checking friends' blogs, research. Does this have anything to do with my inability to do academic and/or fiction-type writing on the computer? No idea. Will have to think about that.
There's this commercial that I keep seeing on TV for hockey. Makes sense, since the season's just getting started. Anyway, the whole thing is basically talking about the season as a narrative. I can't remember exactly what the narrator says, but she talks about how it's a story that plays out - the wins, the losses, the injuries, the individual success stories. I'm not a big sports fan, though I'm sort of one by proxy, I guess - my dad is WAY into the sports, and watching them with him is fun because he'll explain exactly why X situation/action/screw-up is so interesting/such a heartbreak/etc. It's a special kind of grammar that sits within what you might call a narrative structure of the "season" - pre-season hopes, the ramping-up for the early season and race for the playoffs. And then the playoffs of course - the climax, the losers, the winners, men jumping around like little kids and slapping each other's asses in a TOTALLY NON-GAY WAY. Anyway, it was kind of cool to see a commercial that was pretty much overtly talking about sports as a kind of cultural text.
I found the game "Shadow of the Colossus" for ten bucks, which is awesome, because I've been looking for it FOREVER. Our unofficial title for this game is "Horse and Guy" because about 70% of it is you (scrawny hero) riding around the totally empty countryside on your horse. The graphics are great because they give you a really good sense of SCALE. When you stand on the edge of a cliff and look off into the distance you can appreciate the amount of SPACE there. Space that you have to cross, incidentally.
So you wander and you wander and you climb on things and, generally, feel kind of bored. All the better for when you suddenly are confronted with a GIANT FREAKING MONSTER that you have to somehow kill. Once again, scale really increases the "OH SHIT!" factor here. Your scrawny character has to climb up this behemoth, clinging for his life while it tries to shake him off, and find weak points so that you can stab it to death. And this would be cool and fun on its own, but the general quiet beautiful boringness of the quest to GET to the colossus is what makes it. It goes from "fun" to "epic". It's really good game construction - one which is sensitive to pacing, and which effectively keys into the right elements to make it an authentic-feeling experience.
