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The article on reinvention of the World Wide Web by Bill Hilf is describing, how the new media emerges from the standards of old media, such as radio broadcast, film, print and television converging with the development of multimedia, such as CD-ROM content, PC, console games film and video, kiosks, etc. The combination of all these old and new media brought us the World Wide Web or the Internet. This is the author’s idea “Media convergence is the inevitable by-product of the digital evolution”p.1. It is amazing for people to have an interactive global experience via Internet.
The other point that author emphasized is on p.2 “In many ways, convergence is both true and sound theory: media have joined together in many ways and it could be reasonably argued that the Web is the most “multi” of all media types”.
The idea of visualization of listening to the radio broadcast verses watching the television, where both served the same purposes of advertisement and entertainment, radio can be listened any where any time , where as we have to sit in front of the television to watch, same as another box to look into is the computer Internet Web. As McLuhan states about the media content “is the numb stance o f the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind”.
The idea of contrast between the printing press and the Web, news papers get printed in a timely manner, whereas on Web you can read worldwide latest news twenty four hours a day anywhere in the world. As mentioned in the article, p.4 “Along with immediacy, the Web provides the ability to deliver a tremendously larger amount of content than traditional print”.
It was interesting to read the historic perspective of printing press, the gathering of all the news and ideas, then providing them to the mass media. It is fascinating how people in 15th century had so many books to read for few literates, like the Web today with a data overload full of information. In 1588, an Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli designed a “reading wheel”, Ramelli explains how “ a man can see and turn through a large number of books without moving from one spot”. This can be compared to the Web browser of today’s world.
Spoiling Survivor is about the famous Survivor show on television, where the interest of producers and consumers overlap or conflict with each other.
The key idea is about the spoilers, the hard core fans of the show, how they deeply get involved in the show, like using the satellite pictures, watching the taped episodes very keenly, and looked for the hidden information in the show in order to reveal the ending, that really spoils the show for the producers and some audience.
The next idea is the spoiling done as collective intelligence, per Pierre Levy “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all resides in humanity”. It reflects the collective intelligence of the community that gives them the greater power over the producer. Jenkins, p.27, Levy suggests, “that collective intelligence will gradually alter the ways commodity culture operates, Levy sees industry panic over audience participation as shortsighted”.
Another interesting point is participatory, social process of acquiring knowledge holds the collective intelligence. The interest of consumers and producers can be conflicting or overlapping, but they cannot be the same.
My challenging concept from the week’s reading was the question of how does the collective intelligence in the digital communication age breaks down the expert paradigm from the pre-digital communication era.
What did they really mean by ‘myopic perspective”?
Are they going to be producing more shows like Survivor in near future?
This week’s reading about the invention of the printing press and the comparison of newspaper reading verses going into the Web, where you can access all the latest news twenty four hours a day really fascinates me and saves on the paper trash as well.