Reading Response #2 (Media 280)

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

The idea of memex is very interesting. At the same time, it is very amazing that Bush came up with this idea of memex in the 1940s when was before this new technology era. Since technology has been developed a lot, pretty much everything is possible to do and to come up with practical idea like this; however Bush came up with the idea and calculated everything how it would work before this technology era. I think that it is very amazing.

If you look at the drawing of inside of memex from Bush’s article, you see so many similarities from computers today: it has a keyboard and you can find a data stored in the computer by using it, and I thought that today’s computer is designed based on memex. Moreover, it gave us a basic idea of hypertext as we have discussed in class, which is the idea of jumping from one item to another. To have a sense of how hypertext works, we went to Wikipedia and tried where we would reach to with clicking 10 references. We started from J.P Morgan and ended up with the totally different term. Throughout this, I thought that the idea of hypertext is similar to traveling: you may just go straightforward to your destination, or you may stop by some places on a way to the destination. You may not be able reach to your destination without stopping by few places. It is very interesting to think about.

This traveling-like idea helped the development of hypertext and it has been helpful in our lives. I liked the statement what Bush makes in his article: “Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately in hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important” (47). Because we have hypertext now, it is possible to find the same item again easily: the idea of memex created the re-accessibility is and the easiness to do it. In addition to it, it also created “immediateness” to stored item. I think that this immediateness is the most different thing from human’s mind. Bush says that the human’s mind does not work in the way that memex does. I think that the human’s brain has an ability to leap one memory to another, however it cannot do that as smooth and immediate as hypertext does, because the human’s brain does not work mechanically. We forget memory sometimes and just remember it all of the sudden: there is no absoluteness that the human’s brain draws out stored memory anytime we need.

The statement made me thought that we rely on technology to redeem unsatisfactory features in the cerebral mechanism. There is a limit to restore everything we have found or learned in human’s brain. The capacity is depending on how intelligent the person is, but no one can remember everything that they have learned. Today, we redesigned the idea with the developed electronic technology, and we rely on it. Memex as a machine is outdated; however the concept of it is still alive and is helping us as an external part of our brains.

Reading Response #1 (Media 280)

The Medium Is the Message

After the discussion about the reading, The Medium Is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, I have been thinking about new media, which involve new technologies, surrounding us today, and I think that they make our lives much better and easier. Thus, we are relying on them a lot: they are a huge part of our lives today. As one of the classmates said, we need new technologies even to study in college at least here in the States, for example, Internet. Internet help me a lot to study and do class assignments, especially research papers. I do not need to go to library to find books and read all of them for my research for the paper. I can just google to find books that have what I am looking for, and I can read some of the books online, such as on google book search. Google is amazing. If I type key words that I am looking for in the book, google automatically find the pages that have the key words. In the clip we saw in the class, one of the students raises a paper, saying that she went to online instead of reading textbooks and learned the same thing. It made me think that we could learn anything, even what we are learning in school, from the Internet. Internet has all answer we want to know. This is amazing. However, I have less trust any information that I found on the Internet than in books or newspapers: every time when I discover something new on the Internet, I do not trust it completely; however, I never doubt anything written in books or newspapers even if they are hardly believe. This is interesting. I think that this is what McLuhan says in his essay that contents are never changed no matter what kinds of media they have been broadcasted on; however it is tend to be considered that the content has changed. In other words, people tend to think that new media change the contents even though they did not change. I do not say that I think new media are bad or they always wrong, but this is sure that I have less trust on new media than old media, such as books, newspapers, etc. The reason is that new media allow more people to get involved. Internet is a good example of this. Everyone can get to have own website and write anything basically they want to. On the other hand, books and newspapers are different. Authors do enough research of what they are going to write in their books or articles. In addition to it, humans have been reading newspapers to get more information and news since the 17th century. Books have a longer history than that. Therefore, people have a long history with books and newspapers, and that history creates readers’ trusts. On the other hand, Internet has popularized recently, and humans do not have any long history with new technologies, so that they cannot believe as much as paper media, such as books and newspapers, I believe. I do not think that all the information on the Internet is wrong: most of websites have information came from something official materials. Even Wikipedia has note section that have all links to where the information came from, therefore we can look them up to see if the information is right or wrong. However, even if the information came from an official material, it is still harder to believe for me than getting the information by reading books, even if the contents are exactly the same. I though that it is very interesting.

Blog #5

I came a long way to finish this course since last semester when I took MEDP 150. what I had learned in MEDP 150 was basics, and 160 was more advanced based on that. MEDP160 was more interesting and I had more fun than in 150. However what I though is that we did not have enough time to work on every assignment: I was always running out of time to finish all projects, and I wish we had more time. But taking this course was now one of my good experiences in college. The most memorable thing in the class is the short film assignment. I never expected that this assignment would be so fun and interesting. What I learned from this assignment is planing everything before we actually start filming is important. My partner, Shawn, and I discussed a lot in class and planed everything out before we went to filming, so that everything went smooth in the filming. Just what I should have cared more was to hold a camera more stably, because we cannot do anything with shaky shots in editing. That is what I realized in the editing process. It was my first time to edit and use final cut. Once I got used to using final cut, it was easy. However, editing itself was very difficult and took a lot more time than I imagined. It was because that there are so many things that we should think about in terms of "continuity". If I cut a shot even a second earlier than it's supposed to be, the "continuity" will be gone, and it creates totally different feelings on the shot. It was interesting, but tiring at the same time. If we had more time to edit, I would edit sounds and put some music as well as putting a title in the beginning. It was the toughest assignment throughout this course, but I had so much fun overall.

Hopefully, I will extend what I learned in this course and continue studying it further.

Blog #4

Animation is always what children like, and I used to watch it a lot when I was a kid.

As people grown up, everybody stops watching it. What I concern is that it is because animation is lack of reality: characters look mechanical, anything does not look real. However, 3D animation

broke these issues. 3D is a animation style that has been popular more and more today, and many animation movies are 3D. What I like about 3D animation is that it is more realistic than other types of animation. That is why I think that characters in 3D animations are liveliness.

My favorite 3D animation production company is Disney- Pixar. Their works are always my favorite, such as Monsters Inc.,Mr. Incredible, etc. All characters in Pixar's animations are lovable and liveness. The best work of them is Toy Story as I concern.

When the fist Toy Story came out, I was very amazed because all characters which are toys look like real.

For example, the main character, Woody. Woody is a cow boy doll, whose face made of wood, body is cotton, and cloth is a piece of cloth. His face is coated, so it is luster. Audience can know that because they can see how light is reflected on the surface of his face. Unlike it, his costume is made of a piece of cloth, and it does not reflect light, but we see the texture of it, and it looks like it is made of cotton. Like this, we see the details of texture of any objects in 3D animation that we do not see in other types of animation.

Another thing that attract me is the movements of the characters. Most of characters are toys, and they, of course, are not supposed to move by itself when humans are around: toys are supposed to be moved by them. Therefore, they are lifeless when humans are around. But whenever humans are gone, the toys are totally different from how they were before: they talk. run, dance, etc, like humans. Difference is that since they are toy, some of the toys can remove parts of their bodies, like Potato Head. These toys' movements, even human characters', in the animation look very similar to our movements in real life. These characters' movements make them very lifelike and made me think them as humans, not toys.

Like these, Pixar succeeded to use 3D, which enable to show details, to make the animation more believable. They also give these toy characters realistic movements. Including of all these, Toy Story is one of the significant 3D animations, and it is one of my favorites all the time.

Toy Story3 Video Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_FfHA5whXc

Blog #3: A Filmmaker, Teresa Almada.

Teresa Almada's films made me realized that color and brightness affect feeling of film a lot. The first film that we saw at the workshop, All Water Has a Perfect Memory, gave me a feeling of something special. I thought that it was because the color of the film was whitish and bright overall. The story was about a tragedy that happened to Teresa's personal life: the loss of her family member, and the overall color in the film created a memorable feeling, and it made me feel like that what I saw in the film was something special. That is also Teresa's feeling toward this tragedy. Another effect of the use of this whitish, bright color is that it made me feel like that this story of the film is fading away, and it created a concept of film that is seeing a part of somebody's memory/flashback. That is why the use of this color gave me a feeling of memorableness, and it made audience feel like that the story featured in the film is something special. Unlike All Water Has a Perfect Memory, the other films of Teresa that we saw at her presentation had different type of color. In both films, the color looked sharper than All Water Has a Perfect Memory, and the color was just like what we usually see in everyday life. The color made me think that what is happening in the films are real and it is about today, not about past. Also, it gave me a feeling of that the happenings in the films are something actually happening in my life. These different type of colors in Teresa's films made me realized that color affects a lot on what kind of feelings film gives the audience, and messages/themes of the film is also influenced dynamically depending on the use of color. It was very interesting.

Blog#3

I have chosen a scene from the movie, “A Chorus Line”. The story is about an audition for the Broadway show. The scene that I picked is a very beginning scene, and I think that in this scene, the editing is well-done and creates the energized and competitive moods in the audition well. This scene starts with an establishing shot of outside of the theater in which the audition is taking place. The camera first shoots the top of the theatre and moves downward, and then it shoots a long line of the dancers for the audition. This shot shows audience that how competitive this audition is by showing the long line for the audition. Then, the scene changes to the stage of the theatre and suddenly switches to a close-up shot of the choreographer who has just turned back. He is very serious and choosing dancers for the second audition. This close-up shot of the choreographer establishes the vigor mood overall. At the same time, it shows how serious his is and creates the nervous feeling of dancers. The establishing shot changes to the close-up shot all of a sudden, and the cut is obvious; however this obvious, sudden cut gives audience a strong impression and emphasizes the intensity of the audition. Thus, I thought it is successful. After the close-up shot, the camera starts moving away from the choreographer gradually, and it follows him wherever he goes on the stage, and it changes to a next shot: the camera angle changes to high-angle, so that the shot shows all dancers dancing on the entire stage. Even though the camera angle changes suddenly, this cut seems like that it is seamless because it keeps the same color feeling and creates the feeling of continuity. On the other hand, the cut from the establishing shot to the close-up of the choreographer changes the feeling of the color: the color feeling changes bright outside to darker inside of the theatre. The color difference makes the cut between these shots obvious and impressive.

The video clip of the scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0THRk2VYM8

Blog #1, MEDP 160

Today, a lot of websites which allow us to interact with other people are showing up continuously, and everybody's attentions keep shifting from one the next. The best example is Myspace and Facebook. Only a couple years ago everyone used to have Myspace and used to play with it all the time: decorating backgrounds of their own pages, adding music or friends, and uploading photos. I was one of those people who was addicted to Myspace. Myspace, however, has now faded away and Facebook has taken over: everyone is on Facebook all the time, and nobody goes to Myspace anymore. It is now the Facebook age. I still have a Myspace page but barely check it. I visit Facebook more often, and it is the website that I most visit today. The reason is very simple: it is to keep in touch with all my friends, especially who live apart. Since I was born and raised in Japan, I have a lot of friends there. I have many friends in California as well because I used to live there. Facebook is the best way to be in touch with them, because I do not need to keep all of their contact information. In addition, you can upload pictures on Facebook, so that I can see how they are doing. At the same time, I can show all of my friends how I am doing at once: I do not need to send photos to all of my friends. This is very convenient. Even my parents in Tokyo have just started Facebook to see how I am in the States, since I do not send them any pictures of me at all, even though they ask me often to do so. For people who have many friends in far away places, like me, Facebook is very convenient. In addition, it is easy to access to Facebook. That is why I visit Facebook often, and I think that it is the best interactive-able website now, at least to me.