Brandon and Multimedia

Writing 105M Blog

[byu168168]

Tumblr Post #10

1.  So, this is going to be my final post for Writing 105m…it’s always an interesting feeling reaching the end of a school quarter, much less a school year, almost a sense of despondence over what’s coming in the future. For me the nostalgia may not be as strong as it is for a graduating senior but as someone entering his fourth year it’s odd to think this will be my last college summer. Regardless, talking about the class I enjoyed all the different mediums that we worked with. Doing the Wikipedia editing was probably the most fun I had during the course. Being able to leave something on the internet that will always be there and others will look at is an interesting feeling. Videos on YouTube would also fit in that category but this was the first instance that I had worked with Wikipedia and I had never realized the kind of process that went into Wikipedia editing. In my opinion being able to edit well on Wikipedia is a good indication of ability to write. Despite the flack Wikipedia may get for its editing system it is clear there’s a system in place that checks a lot of the edits, looks for verification, there’s ongoing discussion about applicable edits, and other things. I’d say that it gives a valuable lesson to anyone doing a research paper because many of the same steps are included when researching a Wikipedia article to edit, and the kinds of edits that you want to add to it.

              I think that this course through its various projects forced me to be more creative in ways that I’m not accustomed to. I’m an Econ/Statistical Science major so I deal with math…all the time. This is the first quarter in over a year that I haven’t taken only Econ and Stats classes and it was a breath of fresh air. I haven’t really had many opportunities to express myself in classes simply because everything in the classes I take is about formulaic application of concepts, there isn’t much room to be creative.

2. For the video remediation project I worked in a group with Jimmy Mann and Dylan Robbins-Kelley. Our video was called “I Hate UCSB Backpack Alerts, AND SO SHOULD YOU!” The idea for the text source we wanted to work with was an email from the UCSB alert system about an abandoned backpack near the Psychology building. From there we decided to make the video about the daily activities a UCSB student might be doing that would be interrupted by those frequent UCSB alert texts. The brainstorming for the ideas took maybe an hour and went relatively smoothly. Filming only took a day and was made significantly easier by the fact that Dylan and I live in a house with six other people. There was no shortage of willing participants for our film. Because they were our friends it made the filming process enjoyable and it passed a lot faster than you would think. From our original brainstormed ideas we filmed maybe 80% of our total ideas. In editing we would shorten down the clips we would use from the ones that we filmed. For the editing I have to give most of the credit to Jimmy. In terms of editing he was the person that made it all work, Dylan and I may have contributed ideas as to how the film should look but Jimmy was the one with the technical prowess to make the vision a reality.

Once the film was finished the next goal was uploading it and spreading it as far as we could. We didn’t go into the video planning to make it viral or aiming to gather a lot of views. If we had we likely wouldn’t have picked our current topic. While the UCSB backpack alert may have been easy to remediate into a video format it covered too narrow a range of people. The only people who would really understand would be UCSB students. Regardless we posted it on YouTube and first shared it on Facebook. Here is where we started our viral marketing campaign, in the initial post of the video we tagged everyone in the video, there were quite a few actors to tag, tagged people who provided props (no matter how insignificant the prop was), we even tagged the person who threw a frisbee from off-screen. The idea was that the more people tagged in the video the more people will see it on Facebook, not just that but when you see your friend participated in a video it increases the chances that you give it a look. This probably generated 150 views in the first day. The second step of our viral marketing campaign was posting it on Reddit, on the subreddit r/videos. We didn’t post it whenever though, we reasoned that Reddit gets the most traffic at 5AM PST, because people on the East Coast would wake up at 8 AM and when better to check Reddit than when having morning coffee. The relatively early post time would decrease the competition that our post would receive. By 12AM the views had more than doubled with the view count posting 301+, an indication that YouTube was still trying to process the views. This was by far our biggest success.

When we started we each took our own guess as to how many views our video would receive by the Sunday deadline. Even at our most optimistic we were only expecting 200 views, with 100 being a more realistic expectation. The video as of Saturday June 6 resides at 720 views, a far cry from our predictions. Honestly, I’m still baffled we reached that many views just from the promotion that we did. I believe most of the traffic came from Reddit users who browse the new section of r/videos when they first arrive at work. At those hours people likely watch all the videos just to seek for entertainment and that got us the views we have.

 3. The unit on viral literacy definitely changed my views about going viral. I still believe it’s incredibly hard to go viral and that it’s more likely you fall into it than successfully create something viral. I do think though that the power of social media is incredible just from the traction that our video had. I don’t think our video had the widespread appeal or easy to grab aspect that most viral videos have. If the content was worthy of viral I believe it would have gone viral. Prior to and after the project I still feel as if I wouldn’t want to make something viral. To me going viral just seems like a “15 minutes of fame” kind of scenario and I don’t really desire anything of that sort. I don’t think it would help in my future career simply because I doubt that the thing I go viral for will have any relation to what I wish to do, statistics. It seems to me that educational viral is much harder to do unless you have a strong infrastructure and a really good teacher with a wide range of topics, i.e. Khan Academy or Tech Talk, which is the only situation in which it would help my career. I don’t really plan on taking any steps to change the amount of attention I receive but I do understand now that there is a point to liking things, as in giving something a share or like, an option I had usually disregarded because of how pointless I found it.

 Because this is my last post I feel obliged to leave a few comments about the class. I really enjoyed my quarter in the class and I wish everyone a good future. This applies not only to the graduating seniors but our professor who’s leaving UCSB. Change is always a hard thing to deal with, but all we can do as humans is embrace it and move on to the new, bigger, and better things that hopefully await us. Good luck to us all.

[drobbinskelley]

By: Brandon Yu, Dylan Robbins-Kelley, and Jimmy Mann

[byu168168]

Tumblr Post #9

My group got to watch the Kim and Sara’s video project. The premise is simple; it’s a trip through Isla Vista using Google Maps as the text source. The video is supposed to cover a “Perfect Day in IV” starting from Santa Catalina dorm. Following Google Maps they make their way through UCSB out to IV where they go to well-known eatery Freebirds, an iconic establishment of Isla Vista. From there they head through IV to the beach. Having watched the video two days ago I may have missed a few details but that was the gist of the video.  The entire video is accompanied by a navigation voice giving them directions to their next destination. I really liked the idea that they came up and I thought it worked well visually. Translating the bland map to a visually attractive drive through an ocean-side town was a great way to emphasize the beauty around us that gets missed when looking at lines on a map.

              I liked that their video included text pop-ups of the directions that Google Maps fed them. I was even more impressed by the fact that Sara managed to program the electronic voice to say what they wanted to say. This allowed for a wide range of comments to describe the locations they were visiting that aren’t apparent from a simple directions list. It reminded me a lot of Portal, a well-known video game where the narrator is a wise-cracking robot, and adds a special flair to the video. I can’t think of any changes that I would make to the draft that I saw. The idea itself isn’t entirely novel as we saw in class an example of someone who did a cross-country trip only on Google Maps, but it’s a very innovative take on it. In terms of virality I don’t believe it’ll get much traction in a short time simply because it doesn’t appeal to a wide enough audience, only applying to those who live or plan to live here. Any changes to make it more viral would move it away from the initial idea they wanted.

[byu168168]

Tumblr Post #8

Trying to compare the process described in the reader versus my usual process of pre-writing is a bit difficult to explain on a general level; in order to make it easier I’ll cover the steps of the reader in order to provide a sort of sequential sense to my writing process. For one the reader seems to approach the idea as something that’s expected to be spread to a crowd of people whereas when I write I tend to write with a specific person/people in mind. The reader talks as if the ultimate goal is to spread a message whereas my goal when pre-writing is to get a certain idea across regardless of its ease to be spread. Of the six STEPPS described in the reader I find that I only try to incorporate elements of emotion, story, and triggers; half of the six STEPPS. Just in terms of that my pre-writing process is much shorter than what the course reader tries to get us to do, which is examine your work in the context of all six steps. In terms of the emotion steps I do try to put my reader in a certain state of mind to better appeal my point but the amount of thought put into it puts my effort in the same step in question. The public step is completely glossed over in my processes. Overall, I would say the general structure of the formulation of an idea is similar to my pre-writing process but I don’t go anywhere near as in depth nor try to cover as many areas of appeal as the course reader tries to get you to do.

[byu168168]

Tumblr Post #7

Any student of UCSB knows that any time anything of any sort of danger happens on campus they’ll get an email. Nowadays one of the biggest fears of our society is something simple that one can see at school any day, a backpack. We all know about those alerts that talk about how a suspicious unattended backpack was found and everyone should clear the area until authorities inspect it. That’s what my group plans to remediate, we’ll take one of these emails that we’ve received, which shouldn’t be too hard considering how many of them we’ll get. The video will likely include a reenactment of the incident described in the text, however, the other finer details still need to be worked out, such as the “viral” quality of it, the reactions of the people in the video, the message we’re trying to send, etc. The idea itself is interesting to play around with because it applies to UCSB students but also to the general “hysteria” of the population. It brings up the topic of how we view safety in our society and whether any changes need to be made to the way we approach such things.

             My group consists of myself, Jimmy Mann, and Dylan Robbins-Kelley. Jimmy already did this project last year so he has hands on experience with how to shoot a video like this. By his request he will handle editing, a good idea since neither Dylan nor myself have much, if any, experience in this area. In leaving editing to Jimmy, Dylan and I will likely act as utility members. In other words we will handle the various other jobs, filming, script-writing, acting, etc, with some help from Jimmy still of course. I don’t have much experience in video-making so I’ll mainly be trying my best to contribute to the best of my abilities. In regards to our work schedule we don’t have a firm plan at hand yet; we haven’t gotten to that part of the discussion yet. I believe we should have a firm idea of our script/general structure of the video before the end of the week so that filming can commence over the weekend. Ideally we’ll have most everything planned out before filming so it’ll go more smoothly, filming will hopefully take two to three days, then it’ll just come down to editing and polishing the video for submission.

[byu168168]

Floral Telegraph Game of Thrones Style

[byu168168]

Floral Telegraph Post#6

The first step in my floral telegraph project was deciding which phrase I wanted to work with. I was looking through the floral telegraph creating a list noting all the ones that interested me. At the end of it all I had a list of about five phrases but one of them immediately jumped out at me. Prior to this project I had started the Game of Thrones series of books so when I saw the phrase “The Lion and You are Brothers” I immediately thought of one of the primary houses in the book, the Lannisters with their house sigil of the lion. Now, even though I wanted to start working from this point I knew that the next biggest issue would be finding an image that I could actually use as part of my vision simply because I wasn’t expecting to find many free usage Game of Thrones images.

              To my surprise and great luck there was an image which combined the sigils of House Lannister and House Baratheon. For any who don’t know Game of Thrones House Baratheon is the current royal bloodline, and Queen Cersei Lannister married King Robert Baratheon mixing their bloodlines and making their houses brothers by marriage which would play perfectly into my phrase. Underneath the sigil were the words “Ours is the Fury,” the words of House Baratheon. I ended up using a filter to make these words appear similar to blood and nigh unreadable, a symbol of the death of King Robert. I do wish to credit fellow classmate Dylan Robbins-Kelley for this idea though, I wish I had come up with it but it ended up working really well.  I had my picture now but the next step was finding which flowers I wanted to use in my project. At first I wanted to pick flowers with colors that I felt best but after looking through all the flowers none of them really resonated with what I wanted to do. Instead I ended up doing some research on the flowers to try to match flower meanings or representations with the personalities of the two houses.

              “The Lion and You are Brothers” consists of three numbers: 1, 2, and 8. For 1 I chose a lobelia because I found that in Victorian flower language lobelias signified malevolence, an adjective which fits House Lannister perfectly. House Lannister is always seen plotting and scheming with the goal of consolidating as much power as they can and any flower other than the lobelia just didn’t seem to fit. For 2 I chose the rose; a rose tends to be the symbol for love and passion. In the case of King Robert Baratheon he went to war and won the crown over a women, much like how the Trojan War started from Helen. To call King Robert Baratheon anything but lustful and passionate would be incorrect as he’s always drinking wine, always sleeping with whores (I’m not sure if this is an appropriate word to use in the context that this is a school assignment but in true Game of Throne theme I’ll stick with it), or fighting. The man characterized his life by passion.

              My final flower for the number 8 was the poppy. This one was the toughest decision for me by far. I had narrowed the flower down to two choices, the poppy and the lily of the valley. The lily of the valley is well known for being poisonous and poison is a major theme of the Game of Thrones, not just for its role in killing many characters (of which I will avoid naming to prevent unfortunate spoilers) but also for being a coward’s weapon. The poppy on the other hand was a symbol for the fallen soldiers, originating around the time of WWII. It’s interesting how opposite these two flowers are, one is a dishonorable coward’s instrument for murder while the other is to celebrate the honor and duty of fallen soldiers in war. In the end I decided upon the poppy because I wanted a more optimistic way of expressing all the death in Game of Thrones. I’m a bit biased when it comes to that because I personally liked many of the characters that died so I’m more inclined on presenting them with honor than with poison.

              In regards to how I arranged the flowers I just simply outlined the sigil with the flowers in order. I wish I had some more time to do something a bit more creative with it to try to intertwine the meanings of each flower on the actual project though. As it is now the only way to know my motivations in choosing each flower is by reading this post. After arranging the flowers I still needed a background for my sigil because it didn’t cover the entire page and nothing made more sense than the Iron Throne of Westeros. The Iron Throne is where the King sits and is the center of all the controversy in the series, which can be implied by the title Game of Thrones.

              The project ended up turning out better than I thought it did and it really refreshed my memory of Photoshop having not used it since high school. I really liked finding a way to interplay the pictures and flowers, but I was really more focused on significance and meaning rather than artistic ability. The sigils with the background of the Iron Throne while covered with flowers to symbol malevolence, passion, and fallen soldiers seems almost poetic, and I couldn’t have found three better phrases to explain Game of Thrones than those.

[multi-bri-dia-blog]

Take a look at the #nomakeup hashtag on Instagram right now and you’ll 15 MILLION+ PHOTOS of girls uniting to collectively say “we’re not wearing makeup and we need you to know this”.

I mean, I can’t say that this hashtag is 100% girls. There are some very “clever” and “original” guys who use...

[byu168168]

This was an interesting hashtag to do and I agree with much of what you said. It’s ironic that this challenge is meant to promote beauty without makeup but there’s people wearing makeup in the picture. I feel like that’s a commentary on society that all these people are trying to self-affirm their beauty while not even trying to follow the challenge. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being self-confident, but in such a public space it almost seems...not genuine, as if this isn’t the right way to send a message that you can be beautiful without makeup.

[byu168168]

#MVP

I deliberated for a while on what kind of hashtag I wanted to do this assignment on. Did I want to do it on a more serious topic such as the recently very popular incidents of police brutality, or on something in pop culture, or on just a common hashtag? What I ended up settling on was #mvp, partially because Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors had just won the MVP but also because I knew that mvp was something that people everywhere use in common enough language to imply greatness.

Before I started looking at photos my first thoughts would be that most of the pictures would be of Stephen Curry since he had just won the MVP award but surprisingly only about 40% of the pictures involved Curry (including pictures of people celebrating his win). A few of the other pictures were also involving sports athletes such as Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather, undoubtedly because of their recent bout. The rest of the pictures seemed to just be random; there were pictures of couples, pictures of children, selfies, pictures of food, and pictures of video games.  The variety of the pictures honestly surprised me because of the lack of relation to the hashtag. In many cases even after reading the captioning for the pictures I still didn’t understand why they had a #mvp.

It seemed to be that it was almost arbitrary the way people were using the hashtag, almost as if they just liked the way MVP sounds and decided to put it in the hashtag. What I learned is that hashtags aren’t the most reliable way to search for pictures. The amount of randomness associated with the people using hashtags makes it difficult to find the content that would normally be associated with this.

I wasn’t sure if this was just a circumstance that occurred with just my hashtag so I tried out other hashtags to see what the results would be. What I found was the same thing again and again, regardless of the nature of the hashtag it seemed like it would just result in a random collection of pictures. I’d say this is a result of social media being so prevalent and the idea of sharing everything about yourself being the goal for many people.

[byu168168]

Tumblr Post #3 No Media Day

So, I decided to do my no media day last Friday. I don’t have any classes on Friday so I found it the perfect opportunity to go without electronics because I wouldn’t have to worry about being in class. The day started out fairly normally; I slept until about 11 AM because I didn’t set an alarm. It was pretty refreshing to just sleep until I wake up, a luxury that I don’t usually get. Admittedly when I woke up the first reaction was to grab my phone to check the time, my messages, etc.  but I managed to resist the urge when I remembered that I couldn’t.

              The rest of the morning was surprisingly easy without my phone once I got past the initial urge. I made myself a nice breakfast with a muffin and some delicious fresh fruit. Now, this next part was going to be my next challenge, finding something to do while I eat. Just thinking on it I realized that much like everyone else do I’ve become accustomed to using my phone while I eat to read news or catch up on other things. I had planned for this and instead sat down with A Game of Thrones, the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin. I had already watched the television series and recently started the books and saw a day without my cell phone as the perfect opportunity to make a big dent in the book.

              I picked up the book while eating breakfast and wouldn’t put it down until a few hours later when I, to my surprise, had read almost 400 pages. As a child I had always read outside and this case was no different as I sat on the back porch of my house being bathed in the sunlight of an incredibly nice day. Being completely captured by a book really brought me back to my younger days when I would just read and read, burning through books day by day. It made me realize how much things have changed when this was the first time in multiple years that I really READ a book. On the topic of that book I have since finished it and moved onto the second book, making significant progress in that one too.

              The most surreal moment for when I was reading was that I had no sense of time. I’m entirely too used to using my phone to check the time that all I had to check the time in our house was the oven. There would be many times when I would want to know what the time was only to have to begrudgingly get up and walk to the kitchen. I never realized just how convenient having a smart phone made certain things. Anyways, after I finished reading it was probably late afternoon, and at this point I was bored. I decided to go to my friend’s house. At said house I would play a few beer drinking games until I finally went home and slept.

              All in all the day was nowhere near as bad as I thought it’d be. My day was broken up into two parts essentially. Part one was reading which kept me occupied enough that I didn’t even think about using my phone. The second part was playing drinking games, most of which were active enough that again I didn’t need to think about using my phone. I either did a singular activity which would capture all my attention or I was involved in an activity with other people that I could communicate with and have conversations and not need to resort to using my phone to fill awkward, boring moments.

              Not having my phone actually made me realize even moreso how much other people used their phones. When I would be involved in a conversation and I saw someone pull out their phone to check social media it always caught my eye, and for the most part there was always at least one person who fit this description. This didn’t occur on my no media day but a few days later I was in the bathroom when I saw someone standing at the urinal using his phone while doing his business. Just seeing it made me realize how ridiculous the dependency on phones has become that someone can’t put their phone away for five seconds to do their business. I went in and went out before he even made a move from the urinal; I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still standing there with his pants down staring at his phone.

              With all that’s been said it may seem like I’m saying that this was an easy day but I think that’s precisely why it was so easy, it was just a single day. I only had to plan for one day, if the length of time increased then it would become exponentially harder because I’ll begin to reach points where I’ll need to use my phone. Be it to check my messages, check my email, use Yelp to find someplace to go, for the time when I’m on campus to make my classes on time or plan out a meeting with someone. Because it was just a single day I didn’t need to encounter any of these situations but if you told me I had to do it for a week I doubt I could do it without cracking once out of “necessity.” I put necessity in quotes simply because necessity really means having the luxury to do all these things without going through other, more complicated methods.

              All in all, I enjoyed the day. I got to read a good book and there’s not much more that I could’ve asked for.

[byu168168]

My thoughts on Wikipedia

So, what do I think about Wikipedia now? Well, after sitting down and taking the time to edit an article I realized how little I actually knew or understood about Wikipedia. Prior to this assignment all I had ever really known about Wikipedia is that it was a peer-edited system of sharing information on anything of significance. It’s slightly more complicated than that. First off, finding an article that I wanted to write about was much more difficult than I thought. Most of the topics that I felt very comfortable in my knowledge of were already entirely fleshed out and not requiring any attention. This led to me eventually deciding on doing a video game article that I found in the stub video game section, the video game in question being Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce, a game from my high school days.  Having played the game before I was already familiar with many of the mechanics in the game but I knew that having to create this on Wikipedia and for it to be verifiable I needed something more than hands-on experience to write the article.

              I approached the article similar to how I would a research paper. Ironically enough my research papers usually start with me reading the Wikipedia page and looking at the references already listed on the page, which is what I did this time too. The article already had twenty-something citations, much more than what I would’ve thought from the lack of content on the page, so I read through a few of them to discover that most of them were reviews written by reputable sites such as IGN. Going through of the articles I found that most of the information I was looking for was already there.

              I sought out to expand the gameplay section (including a bit about the departure from the traditional game modes that the Dynasty Warriors series had and the introduction of online multiplayer), covering all the new features that had been introduced in this iteration of the franchise.  The majority of my time was spent reading through the articles trying to find relevant information. I also found it prudent to edit most of what the previous author had written as some of his writing was awkwardly worded.

              Looking at the talk page they had also requested a screenshot of the game, which was one of my goals in editing this article. I no longer possess the game so I was incapable of taking my own screenshot and I also wasn’t capable of finding any free usage images to put on Wikipedia. Disappointingly enough this resulted in me not including a screenshot in my final edit; however, I did take the time to learn how to put an image on Wikipedia. The process was much more complicated than I thought it to be because of how many alterations can be made to the image such as the size, orientation, captioning, and location.

              Going into this assignment I wasn’t sure what to expect since I had never edited nor even thought about editing a Wikipedia article before. It was…surprisingly fun though. After submitting my final edit and coming back the next day to see it still there it gave me a sense of satisfaction. It’s an odd feeling knowing that most people when they want to find information will go to Wikipedia, and anyone looking for information on Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce will probably go to a Wikipedia page full of my own writing. Before we began the assignment I believe my professor compared Wikipedia editing to heroin, a sentiment which I didn’t understand until this moment. The fulfillment that I got from knowing that some of my writing is on the Internet in such a public venue is odd, but enjoyable.

Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasty_Warriors:_Strikeforce

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[byu168168]

Wikipedia Editing

First off I want to mention how hard it was to find a stub that I could expand. Most of the topics that I know about/have an interest in have already been fleshed out. What was left to change wasn’t much but I happened upon the wikipedia article for Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasty_Warriors:_Strikeforce), a game which I have played before because my brother had bought it. I plan on expanding the gameplay section using sites such as http://koei.wikia.com/wiki/Dynasty_Warriors:_Strikeforce, along with the official Koei site. I also plan on creating a playable character or new character added section as each entry in this franchise tends to introduce new characters. 

[multi-bri-dia-blog]

Video #1: The first video I found is an educational elective video from Academic Earth, an online collection of free videos lectures from prestigious universities. In addition to lectures, the Academic Earth website features a “Video Elective” section, with relevant and interesting 2-4 minutes...

[byu168168]

I agree with many of the points that are presented here. Just by watching the two videos there is a noticeable difference in the production quality. The Academic Earth video was very well done with beautiful illustrations and high definition video work. The viral video looked fairly amateurish but its appeal was the content of the video. When watching the video I was expecting the dad to give a terrible present, as the title stated, resulting in disappointment by his children (as I’ve watched other videos that worked to a similar degree). Instead of disappointment the children are incredibly polite and show enjoyment in their lackluster presents. What the title of the video implied and what actually occurred is the draw of the video. Regardless, the Academic Earth video was much more informative but it didn’t have the immediate happiness appeal that the viral video did which is likely what results in the difference in view count.

[byu168168]

Viral Videos

For the first video, an educational video, I chose to watch Khan Academy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPkh8kOldU4), more specifically a video about Keynesian Economics. Khan Academy videos are generally structured in an online video lecture setup where he uses a whiteboard program to write/show all the necessary formulas. Khan Academy is well known for providing highly informational videos and this video is no different as he gives an overview of the theory of Keynesian Economics. The viral video I chose to watch was “Dramatic Chipmunk” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Y73sPHKxw), as the title implies there is a chipmunk which turns around wide-eyed to dramatic music. This short six second clip has garnered over 43 million views on popular video sharing site Youtube.

The two videos appeal to very different audiences. The short viral video aimed to be unique and funny which appealed to all audiences who were looking to lighten their mood. Not that much effort was put into the video but its simplicity is one of its charms. It manages to capture your attention with an over the top dramatization that makes the viewer think “how weirdly interesting and funny.” This same wide eyed chipmunk has been seen in many memes also which speaks to its popularity.

The Khan Academy video appeals to a much narrower range, only to people who are aiming to learn through online videos rather than for entertainment. You can see just by watching the video that he’s put in a good amount of effort to formulate what points he wanted to articulate in the video. He has prepared examples coupled with graphs to show a representation of Keynes’ ideas. It’s a well done informational video and it’s easy to see why it draws viewers. He manages to present complicated ideas in a simple, easy to understand manner and is an easy way for people to learn more. His videos cover a huge variety of topics.

It’s interesting to see that a short six second clip can get so many more views than a video with a sizeable amount of effort put in but that’s really a commentary on what the two videos wish to accomplish. More people are looking for something entertaining and mindless when it comes to videos, it’s easy to share with friends and have a laugh over unlike Khan Academy video which can’t really gain traction the way a viral video can. The chipmunk video can be shared immediately because of its widespread appeal. Personally I enjoyed watching the Khan Academy video because I was interested in the topic he was teaching but it definitely wasn’t a video that I could just decide to watch in my boredom like the dramatic chipmunk can. I think that this is one of the great things of this new media age, people are capable of finding videos of anything that they can think of giving birth to more and more ideas and information sharing.

[byu168168]

Writing 105M Assignment 1

Hickey finds that art allows us one of the most important freedoms; art is an outlet for discourse and disagreement. In “A World like Santa Barbara” he goes on to say that we can see in this small world of Santa Barbara a utopia describing it as a “civilization, [which] in this rubric, [is] a bucolic quietude prefiguring the silence of the grave. “ (Hickey pg. 5). It is in this utopia that he formulates the point he’s trying to get across. Santa Barbara is a small scale representation for the rest of the world where we find that what people desire most is the removal of anxiety, we don’t like stress, we don’t like being over-worked, we don’t like to be in states of mind that aren’t enjoyable. On this point I agree with Hickey, where he takes this though is where I take issue. Hickey believes that the lack of anxiety in lives will result in an explosive release of anxiety; he uses the example of killing. He believes that art provides the medium for people to learn to deal with anxiety in a creative manner and that the seemingly continually decreasing value of art will result in a world with “less art, less freedom, and more killings” (Hickey pg. 6).  The view that Hickey presents almost seems elitist, as if he’s saying that without art human civilization isn’t cultured enough to understand the value of life. I do agree that we need an outlet for anxiety but to present art as the single end all medium seems flawed and narrow minded to a point. Personally I’ve never loved art much, being more enamored with the formulas and logic presented in mathematics and sciences but I don’t view myself as someone who is incapable of dealing with anxiety, simply that I do so in alternative ways which I believe applies to most of the other people out there. To generalize killing to anxiety seems to ignore many of the actual issues which can cause these problems, e.g. misogyny and mental illness in the context of the shooting that occurred at UCSB last year.

              Others may state that a medium has neither inherent qualities nor messages and that it is rather who is using the medium that determines its nature. McLuhan aims to present the opposite idea, that the medium itself is the message. He uses an analogy of an electric light, while true that a light is indifferent of what it’s being used for it can instead be argued that what it’s used for wouldn’t exist without light. It is the electric light which shapes its diverse applications. He states that “it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the “content” that is noticed.” The medium is often overlooked because of the notion that its applications are what make it rather than the alternative that we can create because of the medium.

              Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” discusses the idea of reproducible art. While art has always been to some extent reproducible, the creation of replicas, we have found that the evolution of technology has made reproduction even an exact science. Benjamin finds that reproduction has begun to cheapen the quality of art. Art itself should be breathtaking; it should have an essence or an “aura.” To talk about this I wish to reference a quote from a movie I watched when I was a kid “When everyone’s super, no one is” – Syndrome (The Incredibles).  When something is unique it’s special, once it can be replicated and everyone can have this unique quality then it’s no longer special. If we take an artist who sits in a valley and takes the time to “feel” the environment and create the aura in their painting versus someone who takes a picture and posts it to their Instagram we find that it’s clear that in the art-making process we’ve lost a certain amount of substance in what we do. People don’t take the time to contemplate what they’re doing but instead rely on quantity over quality, with enough pictures one will be “artistic” enough to post.

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Writing is like seeing old friends

For me, writing is like catching up with old friends. The conversation starts out a bit awkward and I don’t know how to start out. I’ll throw out a “how have you been?” or a “what’s your college life like?”, just simple things to get the ball rolling. Once the pleasantries are done I start to get into the meat of things and the conversation starts to talk itself out. It’s not the same as any of our old conversations because I have new experiences to share and maybe even a different outlook on life. One topic starts to blend seamlessly into the next topic and next thing I know an four hours has passed and the conversation is over. Saying goodbye is bittersweet because you don’t always know if you said everything you wanted to say, and if you did not, the next chance you get to do so could be a while away. At the end of it all there’s the satisfaction that I got the chance to see my friends again and put my thoughts out there.