#5

The introduction of Jenkins introduces us to the concept of "convergence culture" and what this means to us in terms of "the new media system." He says there is a relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. Jenkins uses a variety of examples throughout the introduction to show us how older technologies like the typewriter have converged to become today's Microsoft Word.

"Convergence is taking place within the same appliances, within the same franchise, within the same company, within the brain of the consumer, and within the same fandom. Convergence involves both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed." (16)

"Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process." (18)

"Yet, right now, our best window into convergence culture comes from looking at the experience of these early settlers and first inhabitants. These elite consumers exert a disproportionate influence on media culture in part because advertisers and media producers are so eager to attract and hold their attention." (23)

When Jenkins discussed cell phones being able to stream the first Bollywood movie, it reminded me of the first time I ever got a cell phone at age 15. One of the temporary free features was T-Mobile's video player, where you could stream videos, movie clips, or trailers on your phone. At the time, this technology was so exciting, but nowadays its no big deal to be able to surf the web and watch full length movies.

So far I see a similarity in Weinberger's use of examples (photo archives, Delicious, iTunes, etc) in Jenkins writing (Bollywood movie, Bert is Evil, students making cell phone porn, etc). I think it helps to drive the point of the text home, however I feel like both texts have been outdated in terms of being able to "teach" the generation in which we have grown up. Jenkins says that in the 1990s access to the public in terms of Internet was the main question, but now its more of skill. I think both Weinberger and Jenkins agree on this idea that skill is what differentiates the American public's use of the internet with someone like me, a DTC student at WSU.

#4

Weinberger - so what?

I think the biggest point in Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous is about how Web 2.0 has increased our awareness to the importance of organization not only on the Internet, but also how it affects our daily lives. I think he also wants us to think about how understanding is much more important in today's world than knowledge.

I feel that Weinberger wants us to think about his three orders as sort of a past, present, and future. Order one represents "old" technologies, like typewriters and encyclopedias, for instance. These technologies got us to where we are today, but with newer and better resources and technology, we use them as a back up.

Order two represents where we are today. We index our photos through cataloging systems, or tags, be it in real life in photo albums, or on the web using services like Flickr. As a society, we are moving towards technologically advanced systems over "old school" ways like tangible photos in boxes that hide under our beds.

Finally, I believe that order three can represent both present and future. We see "web 2.0" slowly moving the Internet as we know it forward. Ten years ago, there were no blogs or tags, just our own "homepage" sites that we built using lame pre-formatted layouts from Geocities or AOL. Now we can create our own "homepages" in the form of blogs, twitter, and social networking sites. But I think by showing us multiple examples of present and past, Weinberger is showing us that eventually what we are using now will also be outdated.

#3

Chapter 8
The point of this chapter was to look at the way in which metadata works in a business sense. It shows us what products, based on what we are looking at, we may also be interested in. Weinberger discusses the "infrastructure of meaning" to which he means the ultimate in miscellaneous - a database based on tags, links, and metadata.

As a DTC major, we should care about this because we will all be working with these forms of data at some point in the future. The majority of us are interested in design - and since the future is on the Internet and with technology, we will most likely be utilizing things like tags and metadata to assist us in our work.

Chapter 9
This chapter was about how the world has gone digital - from cameras to phones, we are utilizing organization in a new way as time goes on. Weinberger compares the utilizations of days past, when we took pictures with a film camera, went to a store to get our film developed, tossed the bad pictures, and stored the rest in a closet or under a bed for a future time. Now we can store thousands of pictures on one storage card on our camera, if we get photos developed its usually for Christmas cards, and if we don't, we can store them on our computers, on sharing sites like Flickr, or send them digitally to family and friends.

As a DTC major, we are affected because organization is the key for a successful design career. We need to be able to leave our client with a site, or design, or whatever, that is both usable yet also modifiable.