Considering the profound global success of James Cameron’s Avatar, as well as the hype surrounding practical 3-D television at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the growing frenzy surrounding the current 3-D craze has got me thinking about the future of cinema and immersive entertainment yet again. Now, we’re no where near seeing holographic, pliant, lifelike simulations like the one illustrated in the clip above – in fact, in our lifetimes we’re more likely to see something like a real starship Enterprise constructed before we ever see its famous Holodeck – but, for all the commotion surrounding 3D, well, it has got me looking at some new entertainment ventures that are edging us closer to true, fully immersive digital entertainment. (more…)
Archive for the ‘digital media’ Category
Edging closer towards the Holodeck
Friday, January 22nd, 2010Piracy is just another word for “Quality Control”
Monday, November 23rd, 2009Today, my video, “The Internet is Unstoppable“, was posted to my program’s official blog by my professor, Kathy Gill. She seemed to like it enough to want to show it to her undergraduate students in another class even. Well, I shared this news on Facebook, where an independent filmmaker friend of mine commented that the idea was great, but that “free” hurts the little guys. I don’t know to what extent piracy endangers content producers on the slim side of the media scale, but I responded with this:
Hey, I don’t condone piracy or content theft of any variety – I’m just discussing what’s already happening. Copyright is a broken concept. You see, as long as the cost of reproducing content is basically zero, then you look pretty foolhardy trying to protect your right to sell an individual media item when it doesn’t cost you anything to create that individual SKU beyond its initial production. And for the little guys who have very limited production costs, they look even more foolish trying to sell digital product for net gain! Why on Earth would you expect people to gullibly contribute to your net profits when they KNOW, right or wrong, how to reproduce it and that it doesn’t cost a dime to do so?
So, by now you’re asking: Well, how do I recapture my production costs, in the least? (more…)
Electronic Dating project now on-line!
Friday, March 13th, 2009It’s finally up, the massive project I’ve been working on all quarter for my ‘Evolutions and Trends in Digital Media’ course at the University of Washington.
Visit the site and be sure to leave comments there and let me know what you think!
Neuromancer
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Fair use image from Wikipedia
Neuromancer, the acclaimed novel from William Gibson published in the eerily appropriate year of 1984, stands as a precursor to not only so much popular speculative fiction which followed, everything from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Holodeck concept to the virtual world of The Matrix, but in many ways postulates the technological ideas seen in plenty of real world concurrent developments, so many of which are taken for granted today, from virtual reality to immersive multi-player online games to ‘predictive’ financial and military database systems to the entire conceit of cyperspace (a term which Gibson first coined) itself. I’m certain countless authors and theorists have studied the book and its story top to bottom, connecting it with so many different science fictions and science realities, that to try to summarize all the potential connections here would be exhaustive. Instead, I hope to focus on artificial intelligence as a potential threat to humanity in this review, a question which lays at the center of the book. I also hope to connect that threat concept to the way cyberspace exists today as a human communications medium, and what potentials our future may hold.
YouTube Audio Preview: is web communication actual “writing” or something else entirely?
Friday, October 10th, 2008It’s generally held that teh intarweb pretty much separates itself from other media in that it’s a two-way street. I publish information in some corner of the web, you publish (as in, comment, vote, react, share, etc.) right back. Sure, “long ago” we had ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the paper, but now communication with those who publish information of any kind is taking place in a way planet Earth has pretty much never seen before.
So, the big questions that I am sure are being researched in the halls of academia today, especially in the field of linquistics, are probably these: How is the internet altering language? How is the internet creating new words and new meanings, or even new languages, such as “AOL speak” (think the letters L-O-L, as in laugh out loud) or “1337 speak” (that’s the word “leet” – for example the 3′s are backwards E’s – as in, “elite internet user speak”, something only other nerds are supposed to understand)? Are typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors merely another way people are accepting written communication as the next evolution of the English language? Is all this hurting or helping the English language? And so on and so forth.
Starting Fresh at UW in the MCDM Program
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Expect to see much more blogging out of me from here on out. I am starting a program in communications in digital media for a Master’s at the University of Washington tomorrow. I have just been extraordinarily busy the last few months preparing for the program and, most recently, relocating from LA to Seattle. Anyway, as part of the program there is an expectation that we students get a-bloggin’, so expect more output out of me.
I have also re-positioned this blog to be hosted within it’s own domain. Previous to last week, the domain nerdacumen.com merely forwarded to a subdomain at matthewstringer.com. Now it’s all viewable within just nerdacumen.com. Hooray!
I think I will also be updating the layout and design. Wait and see. Here’s to renewal, and to nerd-dom.
Much love,
Mattso
Couchsurfing and Digital Natives at the EMP
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Last Wednesday I went to a presentation at the Seattle Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum by a bloke from Harvard about a new book entitled Digital Natives. Actually, it’s more than a book as it also exists in perpetually updating form as a wiki at digitalnative.org. Both forms exist because, as the author put it, in today’s net landscape, the book is obsolete the moment it’s printed. Basically, the conceit behind the concept of a digital native is that any kid born and raised within today’s worldwide new media kingdom is essentially a digital native. How do they interact with one another, what are their means of communication and collaboration, how are they influenced by (and influencing) emergent technologies, and so forth. Check out the digitalnative.org website for the real low-down.
One of the elements of the presentation that I found very intriguing was a brief highlight on couchsurfers. Couchsurfing is a phenomenon that has originated on-line, wherein people find places, couches if you will, to crash on when traveling the world. These networks have cropped up, akin to most major on-line social networks, that allow people to create a profile and either post that they have a couch for a traveler on a budget, or to seek the same. Many new friendships, online and in person, are forming through this. All the anxiety of dealing with strangers aside, what a wonderful way to see the world. travel on a budget, and meet people of like-mindedness. This is just another way the net is changing the world, truly making it a smaller place for all. I won’t mention any specific sites for couchsurfing, but a quick search will, I am sure, turn up plenty of the most popular.
And here I thought couchsurfing involved either never moving one’s butt from the couch on a Saturday of flipping between ABC, ESPN, EPSN2, and CBS watching college football, or, to be more dramatic, taking an actual couch out to Maverick’s on the Central California coast and swimming it out the waves. Now, if you can pull off that second way, I would pay to see it.
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