Midterm 1: Part 1

The posts:

--Call me Samuel
--Proper Etiquette: Spoilers
--The (never ending) Moby Dick Metaphor
--irobot
--Hashtags

As I look through my notes and classmates blogs I have begun to see all the concepts being thrown around right now. And there are a lot of them. I think this mirrors our class in a way. Digital culture is a hugely diverse subject. We are living in the midst of the digital revolution. There is a lot of positive developments going on. For example, crowdsourcing is revolutionizing the way businesses, artists, and science does things. In business you can have a lot more help in refining a product, in testing it on target audiences. In the arts you can bring people together and do things you never thought possible, such as creating a virtual choir. You can show your movie or song to different groups of people to see what works and what doesn't. Indeed, crowdsourcing has allowed access to "the wisdom of the masses". This is also seen in Moby Dick, where Ahab easily gets the crew on his side when he first addresses them, and riles them up, over chasing down the white whale. Ahab did not neglect the importance of the masses. Look at Kompoz, the collaboration site for making music. This is a genius idea, allowing people from all over the world--specifically amateurs--the ability to collaborate and create music. I am very interested to see if this pushes the music industry allowing for even more of a Long Tail effect than already exists in the music industry...which leads me to...

The Long Tail. Or, Diverse markets, the rise of niche and subculture. This Long Tail effect is allowing more people to discover the wonderful world of Indie Music. Something that would never have been possible if not for the explosion of accessibility to music via various places such as Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Amazon, Itunes, etc. There recommendations are creating a long tail effect by leading the buyer down certain paths, gradually finding more obscure music.This explosion of possibility is what is creating modern, fast-paced novels and movies that have all sorts of different genre and elements and even worlds mixed into the same movie (going bovine, wreck it ralph, scott pilgrim vs. the world). Moby Dick is this in a way, it is a mixture of so many different things that it fits into the Long Tail mentality. You have your overarching themes in the novel, such as the white whale and all it represents, and you have other themes that gradually move away from that main theme (the head of the tail). Eventually you can get to quite obscure themes such as Ishmael's Hypochondria.

Identity has been another big theme in this class. Identity is becoming increasingly important due to the fact that having an online presence demands that you put forward some type of identity. That identity you put forward is in your control. You have more control over what pictures you put on facebook, the amount of time you spend writing and editing the content you will put up. In essence, all very different than real time. I am intrigued by the concept of identity creation--finding out who you are, who you want to be.

Finally, Video games have been another item of interest for me. I wonder, with so many advances in the technological aspect of video games, are we losing out on some of the simplicity of the older games? And does this in turn reflect what we might be losing out on with all the advancements (bigger,faster, better) in the digital realm as a whole? Are things so concerned with being newer, flashier, and better that the "good ol' simple life" is being abandoned? And is that a bad thing or a good thing?