Thursday, April 15, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Howard Rheingold sums it up: we need a good "crap detector"
21st century media literacies from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
Howard Rheingold is a pioneer.
Howard hit on one major takeaway that I had from our week in the UK. “Increasingly I think the digital divide is less about access to technology and more about the difference between those who know how and those who don’t know how,” he said. He’s convinced that what’s most important is not access to the Internet — we have more than a billion people on the Internet now and there are 4 billion phones out there — but access to knowledge and literacies for the digital age. “The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift” and discern. “Skill plus social” is the key.socialmedia.biz, Howard Rheingold on essential media literacies | Socialmedia.biz, Jul 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Is it research or is it fun? why not both?
Checked out The Chutry Experiment where Prof Chuck Tryon blogs about film and new media, and found a link to an inspired remix showing McCain's links to his political friends (see this video about remixing) "My Friends, the Musical", by an extremely skilled video remixer who posts at the YouTube channel Humanitainment.
I love the way the remix makes its points with verbal and visual puns on "my friends" and a wicked sense of humor.
This link then led me to a site that promotes and houses video remixes, RemixAmerica.org. What a find! not just for the entertaining and thought-provoking remixes, but also becaue the site provides you with the means to make and post your own! I'm going to try it out later. Here is how RemixAmerica describes itself on their About page:
RemixAmerica.org is a multi-partisan, non-profit website that uses digital technology to give everyone the chance to own the words, the music, the images and sounds of America in digital form; to remix those expressions and ideas with their own; and to send the products of our community's creativity out to the world... where others will come back to us and start it all over again...
Poking around, I came across this absolutely superb remix of STYCYD judging and the presidential debates. For those of us who watched STYCD faithfully, it's fun as hell to see the judges comments repurposed this way. What I especially like is that the message the judges give the two candidates is that they have to listen to the audience. It's a great way to show how reality TV, even as a crass money-making operation, also allows for 'talk-back' from the viewers. More to the political point, for those of us who are frustrated at some of Obama's less-than-audacious positions, this vid gives a refreshing critique of his positions on "clean coal" and saber-rattling in Afghanistan. So I checked out the site of the remixer, Rebellious Pixels, and discovered the site of activist, photographer, videographer and busy, busy guy Jonathan McIntosh.
He just posted about his presentation at a New Media conference called Ars Electronica in Austria. (Note to self: listen to the talk!)
His remix playlist, the material he presented in his talk, is here (thanks, Jonathan, for your generosity in posting all this!)
For future reflection: when people take copyrighted footage and repurpose it for parody, political commentary, or just for fun, what are the issues of Fair Use that come up? The Center for Social Media at American University has a blog where people are talking about this and other issues related to this emerging phenomenon of Web 2.0 creativity, citizen journalism and activism, and collective intelligence.
There is a lot to reread and digest. here. A final note: a Google search on McIntosh led me to El Oso's (David Sasaki) work; he was the Latin American editor of Global Voices Online, one of my favorite blog portals, and now he is dedicating himself to outreach through Rising Voices Awesome!