What struck me as I half-watched the ill-fated game was the importance of digital cable and on-demand video for how we view and re-view cultural moments such as the Superbowl and its ads. For example, take the infamous Justin/Janet “costume malfunction” of the 2004 Superbowl half-time show. It was early in my DVR experience, and when the infamous “malfunction” occurred, I was incredulous. Did what I think just happened, happen? Stop. Rewind. Replay. Pause. Stop. Rewind.  I can now stop time and slow it to the pace I need. What did we do before DVR?

All of a sudden, TV becomes a fundamentally different viewing experience. Though the NFL has implemented the “instant replay” for the first time in 1986 (and then abandoned it and then brought it back in 1999), now a large number or viewers of television have that power. Furthermore, even if some do not have that ability when watching television, the increasing pervasiveness of online video is making more and more moments available for us to play and replay over and over.

Meanwhile, we take it for granted that we will have access to much content whenever we wish. Ads during the Superbowl this season were touted as being available on MySpace after the game.  What other ways has increased user control and on-demand video impacted our role as “audience”?

The Life Cycle positions the blogger in the role of consumer, at least that’s how I read it. The blogger has slightly more agency than the typical consumer, according to this diagram, based on the ability to generate data that can be easily found and sorted for marketers. In part, this outlook is fueled by the presence if “adservers” and “corporations” are in the middle of the cycle. Of course, the relationship of your blog to adservers depends on whether you have registered to place ads on your blog. And, not to burst anyone’s bubble, but the significance of one’s blog for a corporation, I suspect, will still depend on the influence of the blog or whether more influential blogs pick up on a particular story and start to link to it. Of course, this can be a very powerful way to generate attention for specific concerns as a consumer, which is not easily replicated by non-digital means.

However, our role on the internet is as more than consumers, I hope. If we were thinking of the life cycle of a blog post beyond a consumer role, what other components might be a part of this diagram?

“We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language.” – from the Postmodern Condition

On the one hand, with the burgeoning volumes of information available, some sort of whittling down is necessary. On the other hand, this digitized version of the world becomes the only cultural framework the “world” will know. This digital colonization of the mind will be the ultimate cultural monopoly.

Doing a straight-up google search may be useful for pulling up the book you want from Amazon or skimming some information in Wikipedia. Despite what our laziness presumes– and we *all* start out lazy when it comes to searching for information– a regular google search is not the be all and end all of finding information.

To search blog content, specialized searches are necessary.  For this I recommend:

1. Technorati -The Mother of all Blog Search Engines
2. Google Blogs – Tip via Learning Aesthetics relayed from Dumb Little Man
3. Sphere – A different approach

Although seeking out blog content is challenging at first, as one begins to develop a network of other informed netizens who are also actively processing and referring various information.  Knowing where to look is just the beginning! Next up: How do you choose effective keywords–not just for searching for blog content but for any content?

Though I am aware there are semantic reasons for referring to “new media,” it is a messy term. The most inherent aspect of what makes it “new” has nothing to do with time per se. The idea of hypertext, for example, is not “new” exactly. Engelbart, the father of HCI, was conceptualizing how hypertext would function in the late 1960s. “The Mother of all Demos” was conducted in 1968 and should look very familiar to anyone familiar with how computers process data.

The shift from traditional media forms to “new” or digital media has fractured the transmission model of communication, especially in terms of mass communication. Now end-users (aka, digital citizens) have choices about what they want to “consume,” as well as when, with whom, and for how long.

But consumption really isn’t the most interesting part. With digital media, we all have the option to play along too. Ben notes the significance of video games as complex environments. In addition, we all have access to mix, mashup, and redistribute textual, visual, or video content. We can instantly share information via wikis, blogs, twitter, SMS to any number of people from our closest friends to a global community. Though we have this capability, how many of us actually take advantage of the possibilities though?

One important aspect of effective design, I believe, is giving users a clear choice. On my Mac, when I install software updates, the above demonstrates the choices given to me. What if I am in the middle of something? I am provided with only two options, both of which amount to the same result–I have to stop what I am doing to accommodate the software updates. Whenever a user is given choices, the choices should result in different outcomes (to avoid redundancy) and should take into account assumptions a user will make. In this case, a logical assumption is that if I don’t want to restart, my other option would be to wait until later to restart. By providing that option, the designer can minimize potential user error.

If you are wondering, no I have not ever pressed either button and accidentally restarted or shut down. But every time I have encountered this message, I have wondered how it passed usability testing.

While blogging may seem like just a simple journaling exercise, it can be very, very different. Notice I say “can.” Not everyone starts blogging with the idea of developing a conversation with other bloggers and with visitors to the blog–but in the course of this semester we will explore blogs with this ultimate goal in mind. This creates both exciting opportunities and a need for caution. You have an audience, and the whole idea of blogging is that you would cultivate and interact with your audience. In fact, audience may not be the appropriate word for the readership of a blog. A popular blog facilitates an involved community of readers.

One of the most effective ways to get a better sense of what is involved in blogging is to read what others have written about it. In On Becoming A Good Blogger, Shai Collins offers helpful insight in this regard. Twenty Tips for Good Blogging also gives important perspective to effective blogging habits.

Posting openly online does leave potential for misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or sometimes just plain malicious behavior. It can be disconcerting at first when someone comments on your words or critiques your words. This will get easier over time. Keep in mind too that with trackbacks in blogs, if you post a critique of someone else’s writing on your own blog, the original author will often easily find it. For this reason, when you are referring to the writings of others, it is best to keep a constructive tone to the writing.

It doesn’t happen often, but there are times when blogging can result in vicious personal attacks. One such example was a widely denounced personal attack on Kathy Sierra. At the time of those attacks, a movement developed for a blogger code of conduct.

You may already be aware that computer-mediated communication can be more unclear because of the lack of verbal cues inherent in face-to-face communication paired with the ease of rapid response, which can result in an escalation of emotion very quickly. As we continue to explore new media over the course of this semester, this will be important to remember.

In no particular order:

apophenia: danah boyd comments on her research in the areas of social networking and other new media phenomena, particularly, I believe, from a sociological perspective.

Confessions of an Aca-fan: Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, among numerous other books, writes about new media and convergence, particularly fan culture and transmedia development.

jill/txt:  Jill Walker Rettberg comments on online storytelling, among other topics.

theory.is.the.reason:  Kevin Lim writes about social technology.

grand text auto: A group blog, whereby several new media artists–Mary Flanagan, Michael Matea, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin– comment on the intersection of art and new media.

I am not anti-book by any means. I majored in English literature as an undergraduate student myself because I love books. I move boxes of them with what seems like annual moves, and even worse my husband has art books. Do you know how heavy those books are? Another caveat, not only do we have tons of books, but my husband is a printmaker. In other words, paper-based things go on at home.  But equating with the content of books with the need to read words on a page is missing the point. The recently released Amazon Kindle is one of the steps we are making as a society towards digital distribution of the written word. Is a book less of a book if it is distributed electronically?

The message I am really getting from Greg’s post is this: The type of reading where one person engages quietly and reflectively with a text *might* best be experienced with a printed page.  There are so many distractions in our daily lives that it is not just the literary engagement with the text that is important, it is developing an attention span to engage with something that lasts more than 30 seconds.