Media Project Proposal

Media Fast Vision

The media fast enlightened a way of viewing man and machine in a symbiotic way.  We want to create either a video or literary work that metaphorically presents our discovery in a creative way.

Current Peer Social proof:

Tara Pina:

Damn right I worship terminator.....and would die without the machines...... but jokes aside in all reality, I just don't see the reasoning or necessity because 1) I feel at balance with technology - i am the master not the slave! and 2) I don't need to make myself a guinea pig to find out something that is known just like I don't need to smoke meth for that experience .... ;)

Greg Williams:

Great idea +Curtis Jenkins , I will need to check my calendar closely so that I don't miss any specific homework that requires me to use media! Being a media arts major that may be difficult. Have you seen what this fellow from "The Verge" has been doing? Pretty interesting when it comes to media fasting like a boss

Gwendolyn Hammer:

I'd participate. If I planned ahead far enough.

Outside Social proof:

List of future social proof:

Professor Callahan (Professor of Communications)

Jim Stogdil (Author of “My Paleo Media Diet”)

Professor Kelly and Professor Doug McKinley (Professors of Media Effects)

Blog Links:

http://xxicenturygirl.blogspot.com/2012/09/media-fast-i-cant-im-connected.html

http://socialmediacrityandme.blogspot.com/2012/09/media-fast.html

http://dyckellis326.blogspot.com/2012/09/reflections-on-media-fast-we-are-so.html

http://ricksrebecca326.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-media-fast-sunday.html

http://digitalcommunicationplease.blogspot.com/2012/09/media-fast-media-snacking-at-least-it.html

http://craftonallie326.blogspot.com/2012/09/media-fastunavoidable-failure.html

Literary Review:

1.  Niche Envy- by Joseph Turow

2.  Fictional Realities- by J.J.A. Mooij

3.  Theories of Human Communication- Stephen Littlejohn and Karen Foss

Literary Component:  The study of Media and Man make up a large part of the communication studies society.  Fully understanding the subject matter and how it can be presented in an interesting and clever analogy could make the information we’ve gained more receivable then simply placing it in a long boring report.  See how many people have read online scholar journals of media effects as opposed to the number that have seen the Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, or God Bless America.

The project will be mainly geared towards the communication studies groups.  This consist of both professors in Public Relations, Advertising, Communications, and Journalism but also deals with Web Design and parts of Psychology.  This project could not only target scholars in these areas, but students as well.  The project would either be presented in a video, screenplay, or literary work.

Success Criteria:

The main idea is to create a literary or media piece that presents the idea that man and machine already live in a symbiotic relationship.  Metaphoric pieces have already been done in the past but almost all of them reflect a negative image of the Machines struggle with Man such as in The Terminator, Wally, and The Matrix.  We want to offer a fresh perspective.

Prototype:

The initial discovery phase of this project has already been completed by a large part of the class.  While the main presentation will be done by a small group, the whole class has already been involved.  Frankly I’m a little frustrated I’ve been trying to plan out everything with absolutely no guidelines all to have them dropped on my head and told I need this whole thing mapped out in 48 hours.

Here's the media fast Poster we've already use to try and gain participation in the fast.

 

 

The Last Media Fast I Will Ever Do

When I started this project, I was hoping for a little realization.  Maybe an understanding, or at worst, a mental breakdown.  I had no idea what was really in store for me. 

My plan was perfect, start the media fast off with a date.  Can’t use cellphones on a date anyways, not without looking like a tool.  A movie was obviously out, what about the hot springs?  It’d be a good way to escape media and still have fun.  First off, coordinating a date without a phone was impossible.  I eventually resorted to having my roommate text the girl for me.  I know that’s like having your atheist friend steal bubble gum for you because he’s already going to hell, but it’s the only way things could work.

Two hours later, we all clamper up to the lip of the hot springs, just as my flashlight begins to die.  I can already tell there’s a gang of people in one of the springs, laughing and splashing around like a bunch of amped up chimpanzees.  Quickly sliding my dying light across them, I try to see just how many people there are.  The light bounces back to my eye balls exposing a scene of pasty white naked bodies that will forever sear my darkest nightmares.  And then my flashlight dies.  I instinctively reach for my cellphone, all too remember it’s been safely locked away for the media fast.  So there I am, surrounded by darkness, in the middle of a nudist colony.

The group I’m with becomes impatient—what’s the hold up?  I try to whisper something about the nudies, but it comes out much too loud.  With nothing left to do, I slink over to the hot springs right next to the skinnies.  Trying to navigate around is terrible, as I pull off my shirt and shoes.  At one point, I end up falling into the nudist hot tube.  For my own sake, I pray it was only somebody’s arm I grabbed to stabilize myself.  Suddenly, I realize my sister knows where other hot springs are somewhere up river if I could just call her.  A wave of relief washes over me, quickly replaces by a titanic frost as I realize again,  I don’t have my phone.  And so, for what is probably the most awkward date I will ever have in my life, we sit in the dark, terrified to move as we listen to the bizarre laughter and splashing of a bunch of buck-naked libertarians.

I thought this experience would show me just how much power machines had in my life.  What I discovered is that the two are intertwined.  Not just with work, or school, but socially, emotionally, everything.  Machines are not our masters, nor are we their slaves.  They’re part of us, just like we are part of them.  Take away my cellphone and you’ve taken away a social element that’s infused with everything else I do socially.  We were never fighting the terminators after all, we were the terminators.

 

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Everyone’s in the Media Fast

Hey everyone, so we’ve all been recruited into the media fast.  What’s that?  You’re happy being a wheel-running gerbil slave to your iPhone?  Well, I'll explain just how the media fast is going to go.  This weekend, for 24 hours, no media.  That means cellphones, Internet, and television or music.  The point isn’t to do it, it's simple to experience what it would be like.  So if you’re worried you won't make it the full 24 hours, just try to go as long as you can.  If you have to stop for work, that's just fine.  Afterwards, write a blog about the experience, the whole experience.  Meaning if you didn’t make it the full 24 hours or you cheated, just say so in the blog.  Make it as honest as possible.  And if you’re with Tara’s terminator-worshipping addicts and hate the media fast, then write that in your blog about that and tell me why.  Using all the information and different blogs, well make a video presenting it all.  I already know several communications professors interested in just how this turns out.  Truly, we owe it to our potentially overweight, cyber crazed children to show u still have power over the machines.

Media Fast, Could we do it?

Alright, Alright.  I know I’ve sorta formed this “beat down the robots” thing with a couple other students.  I think, however, that we all recognize both the positive but also the negative effects that digi-cult has.  A lot of the fear from technology is based on future events.  For example, I’m not afraid of my Iphone now, but movies like terminator freak me out.  No one wants to be slaves to a bunch of souped-up toasters with superhuman brains, no one.  As an ad major, I’ve realized how much industries take advantage of people’s reliance on technology today.  In other words, we’re already slaves.  Yah yah, I’m just getting dramatic right?  We’ll here’s my idea.  What if we did a media fast to see just how depend our world is on technology.  That means this Friday or Saturday, a full 24 hours media fast.  It’s a bigger commitment than it first sounds.  No cellphone, no laptops, internet, movies, television.  Cars and microwaves aren’t media, so that’s alright.  The point is to show just how already depend we are on media technology.  I think it’d be a good idea for a collaborated project we could all contribute to in our blogs afterwards.  So, What do you guys think?

Oh, and what does this have to do with Jurassic Park?  Who really had the power at the end of the movie, the dinosaurs chasing the people or the people being eaten? 

We’ve all got Plastic Surgery in Digi-cult

I’ve made some bold claims in presenting this blog.  You don’t like being called fake.  You shouldn’t.  Fake is bad.  Fake is like Michael Jackson change my skin color and hang my baby off a balcony.  And maybe you’re not fake, but you’re definitely not telling the whole truth.  Try changing your profile picture  to a red-eyed, sleep-deprived, and emotionally edgy college student.  Of course that’d be ridiculous.  My employer sees my Facebook, my ex-girlfriend might check on it, my mother has no idea I stay up all night watching Arrested Development and talking with my roommates.  Officially, this is called Identity management Theory.  Basically, we all try to present ourselves in the best light.  We show ourselves like we want others to see us.  I want people to think I’m funny and creative, so I photoshopped a ridiculously large fish into my profile pic.  Professor Gideon wants to be seen as an intelligent different than your normal pulpit-pounding lecture stiffs.  Hence the reason for the out-of-focus books and his unorthodox not-looking-at-the-camera pose.  We all create our own story online.  The real question is, so what? 

Why Women Will Rule the World

The infographic says it all.  Still an analysis of such a claim deserves an explanation.  What is the overall premise of Jurassic Park?  Man creates something he cannot control.  In essence, the conflict truly lies not with Man vs. Dinosaur, but Man vs. his own bloody potential.  A potential to create something he has no real way of controlling.  Doesn’t seem like digital culture?  Think internet privacy rights, copyright infrigment, Napster, the dot com companies.  The internet was created and released into its tropical amusement park by a bunch of John Hammonds with a God complex.  Little did they know soon it would learn to have little problem babies and figure out how to open doors.

            In Jurassic Park, the problems start slow.  The dinosaurs originally sneak off to a small coastal area of Costa Rico and eat a baby.  Just one baby.  I mean, I’m not trying to down play the death of a fictional infant, but one baby isn’t a disatster.  Digital culture had just a couple problems in the beginning too.  Who could have known the Turkey raptors would soon become T-rexes?  Al Gore would probably say he could have, but that’s about it.  Besides, when you just finish up the crisis of facing a nuclear war, cyber problems don’t seem too bad.  But the internet has mutated into a thing of its own, unpolicable by the world.  And to be truthful, I don’t know if I want Big Brother putting his big thumb of censorship in my face.  In essence, we face the same problems as John Hammond.  Do we really want to destroy the dinosaurs, to take away the power we’ve already experienced?  Because in the end, the issue really comes back to us fighting our own selves.

Facebook Kills Facebook

If you haven’t done this, go ahead.  Try it.  Just take the Lollipop. 

http://www.takethislollipop.com/

     Did you do it?  You’re horrified aren’t you.  If you’re not a little freaked out, something’s wrong with you.  No one should enjoy being virtually stalked by Igor in a wife-beater.  Feel like swearing off Facebook til the bad taste in your mouth goes away?  Isn’t it bizarre that this Facebook app is actually being used to discourage Facebook.  Today’s culture is split in two different social pressures.  One sees Facebook as a pop culture icon.  People expect you to have a Facebook, to add them as friends and post half-hearted messages on their wall.  The other half sees Facebook as a waste of time and a privacy infraction.  No one wants to seem like the kid that spends all day on the computer refreshing the page in hopes someone cares.  These conflicting pressures come out in the form of creations used by Facebook to destroy Facebook.  Burger King’s social media campaign used Facebook to encourage members to actually delete friends in order to get free Whoopers.  Eventually Facebook declared the campaign was using social media to kill social media and forced it to be pulled.  The son kills the father, Freud was right yet again.

The Raptors of Digital Culture

Jurassic Park scared me so bad as a child, even Barney would put me in screaming fits.  Raptors with 6 inch claws and goats being mutilated isn’t the best mixture for a bed time story.  It seemed like the worst thing to choose to reopen the nightmares of my childhood.  But after spending two hours at Barnes and Noble shifting through rows and rows of fiction and science fiction all the while surrounded by highly unsanitized mole people pouring over anime books, Jurassic Park didn’t seem so bad.  When my fingers thumbed over its cover page, I decided “that’ll do, pig.  That’ll do.”  What do dinosaurs and Digital Culture have to do with each other?  I’ll say everything, but I’m a pathological liar.  Think about it though, first of all, the dinosaurs were created by machines.  Well, we created the machines that created the dinosaurs.  Just like we created the machines that created digital culture.  And just like dinosaurs tearing lawyers in half… well digital culture doesn’t do that, but we can always hope one day.  Still, the connections are potentially endless, thus my decision to read Michael Criton’s Jurassic Park.

Big Brother Knows You Need Milk!

Wake up to find almost no milk left in the fridge.  Now you’ve got to decide whether to eat your cereal dry or try pouring Pepsi on it again.  Days like this have made us all wish the fridge just automatically knew when to replace the milk jugs.  We longed for the days when the world threw what we wanted at our feet.  And then it happened, without expecting it, and suddenly it feels more like a scene out of terminator than paradise.   In his book, Niche Envy, Joseph Turow explains that marketing and consumer-focused businesses have become centered around data-driven relationships from a cornucopia of virtual sources.

 
With the introduction of new surveillance technologies that only continue to increase their hold over the personal information of our lives, companies are creating customer profiles to predict and customize their relationship into seemingly perfect matches.  As an advertising student, this seems like an amazing step in advancement to me.  A world where individuals are no longer forced to stare at ads that would never interest them, but instead to be presented every time with something one would actually consider buying.  And yet, Joseph Turow makes a compelling argument that it will lead to the unequal discrimination of market segments.  People will be virtually descriminated without realizing that others are not recieving the same treatment.  Pricing would become based on your profile, changing from person to person.  In truth, Joseph Turow’s nightmare has already come true.  Clout uses technology to give individuals scores based on their online influence.  Companies use these scores to give special deals to those with the highest Clout score.  In conclusion, This book does a chilling job of revealing the other side of customer profiling rarely brought to light.

 

The Catastrophy of Youtube

The Catastrophy of Youtube

 

 

       Another cat video flies across Youtube and I mentally gag on a virtual hairball.  It’s not just the ridiculously stupid look on these feline’s faces or the way my Rasputin of ex-girlfriend adored the creatures.  No, it’s what these seemingly harmless oversized rats flooding the pages of the internet represents – the devolution of hard work.  Think I’m crazy?  You’ve just been brainwashed by too many videos of fuzzy kittens hitchhiking on robot vacuums to see the light, I’ll explain.  Recently, one of the advertising studios I keep tabs on stated they were no longer doing advertising, but “catvertising”. 

Of course the video they produced was a clever joke meant to ride the pop culture wake that cat videos have been putting out.  Still, the execution of the video is hilarious, a great representation of both imagination and thousands of hours of hard work.  And yet, its total amount of views peaks just under 2 million.  Compare this now with the famous “stalking cat” or “ninja cat” video that boast an insane 35 million views.  This video took (even assuming the cat had to be trained) little more than a couple hours and less imagination most people have in their pinky toe.  The internet might fuel the passions of hardworking individuals, but has created a hideous feline of a Frankenstein to destroy them as well.