I am almost finished with my grad thesis, so I thought I would post the abstract here for the world to read.

Coming into the age of globalised media coverage, major media events once limited to a specific country are now shared across the world. The semiotic and representational systems employed in the media coverage of these events shape our understanding of international relations, power structures, and public opinion. Royal weddings and political demonstrations have recently found a transnational audience, binding them together in a common cause or celebration. This project analyses the local appropriation of global media events, the media coverage that facilitates adoption, and the semiotic translations involved in the process.

“Steve Jobs is dead” read the headline on many a news blog last evening. For more than three hours my Twitter stream was filled with quotes, condolences, epiphanies of the frailty of life, and tributes to one the greatest inventors, innovators, and marketers ever to live in this earth. A connected globe of humans mourned this man’s passing in the same instant, connected to each other, united with each other, by way of their media extensions. Millions of people who, even six years ago, would mostly be considered strangers in the others’ minds were instantly family.

The transient nature of these connections is interesting–and probably a deeper topic for another post–and it led to a specific group of people (call them trolls or otherwise) who just could not understand the outpouring of tribute for a man they had never met. “Why,” they asked, “would we mourn someone who made mistakes? Who behaved, sometimes, like a terrible person? Whose life was focused on business?” ¶ Read More…

She never used to sleep. But me, I feel I’ve been asleep my entire life.
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Recently I wrote about Google Buzz and some of its shortfalls, detailing what it does and doesn’t do well, along with some speculative scenarios that could see Buzz becoming a dangerous infraction on privacy. I think this did well to give a very basic overview of what Buzz does and, hopefully, help us be on the look out as responsible media users for things that seem just a little bit fishy in the Google world.

What that little project didn’t do is look at the inner workings of Google the parent company or how Buzz was birthed. Now, I’m not an insider and Google itself isn’t the most vocal about its trade secrets. However, with a little bit of research and the help of people who keep track of acquisitions, I think we can start to get a pretty good picture of what makes up Buzz.
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This mini-autobiography was written as a class assignment for Understanding Media Studies in the Media Studies MA program at The New School.

Perhaps unlike some of my colleagues and predecessors in this MA program, my intellectual story hasn’t been defined by distinct, earth-shattering moments of revelation.  In fact, very few people were involved in my scholarly formation in regards to this program.  But maybe that makes my story all the more unique.  Since childhood, my interests have always been shaped and informed by music, visual design, film, television and print.  In some ways it seems this course of study was inevitable. In any case, I know why I am pursuing this degree, and in this essay we’ll look at the progression of circumstances and choices that let me to this point.

In high school my interests always stood firmly grounded in the technical side of media.  As an audio technician I learned the skills of removing distraction to let whatever voice or message I was amplifying be understood as clearly as possible.  This philosophy was one I developed on my own and succinctly stated to as many people as would listen to my yammering.

I learned the basics of the art of video editing in an internship under Tony Mercado. His experience as both a cameraman and editor for various documentary films, along with his prowess for technical processes, further developed my love of multimedia.  At the same time, it definitely played up my computer geekiness. ¶ Read More…

The following is a discussion topic that I am leading with @paisian in our Media Literacy course at The New School.

As this week’s topic is Digital Participatory Culture we (Neal and Joel) thought it only suitable to collaborate entirely on the discussion piece to kick this off. We used Google Wave to formulate our ideas and get a basic outline of what’s to come and then moved it into a shared Google Document to put the last formatting touches on it.

The discussion this week will break down what we took away as the most significant aspects of the new digital participatory culture and attempt to stratify all of these new ideas with your experiences, thoughts, ideas and research.

Many of us in this course have grown up with computers and the Internet present for most of our lives. Those of us who were recently undergrads most likely connected pretty distinctly with both the Jenkins and Watkins readings.

Jenkins defines this new participatory culture as,

“A culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.”
(pp. 3)

With so much of our day-to-day lives wrapped up in the digital world, at some point you have to jump in and start contributing to the discussion. As Jörg has mentioned, Jenkins has shown us that in order to stay relevant and alive in the digital culture, we need to participate in it. Today, that takes many forms.
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Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz. ¶ Read More…