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Henry Jenkins

http://civic.mit.edu/team/henry-jenkins
This website talks a little bit about Henry Jenkins and how he is a Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and also how he is a professor of humanities. He is also pushing for the education of students through video games, which I thought was pretty cool. He is part of a team that looks into making sure young people are fully able to use proper social skills in the "new media landscape." The website also gives links to Jenkins blog.
http://henryjenkins.org/
His blog is very interesting and his most rent blog talks about Brenda Laurel, a dear collogue of his. He says that Brenda Laurel has helped to make the computer a "sustainable digital culture" for the future.  She has looed into what computer games have to offer the world and "what kinds of experiences games have to offer." As I discussed before this is something that Jenkins is very interested in. If you are intrigued in some of Jenkins ideals I encourage you to look at some of his blog posts. I found several of them to be very insightful.

In the above video Jenkins talks about how the average person can take control of information for themselves now. We are now about see government statistics and make them known to call a change. he talks about a transmedia project and how we can put things into many types of media and this helps to strengthen it. He says that the Obama campaign did a great job of this as it used multiple types of media.

The British Colonization of India and Beans from Even Stevens

 

Last Wednesday I was doing a little research on the internet for a paper about British colonization of India when suddenly it popped into my head, “I wonder what Beans from Even Stevens looks like as an adult.” I open a new browser and typed his name into Google. Half an hour later I knew everything about Steven Anthony Lawrence, born on January 19, 1990, who was last seen in an Old Spice commercial in 2012 dressed as a dog, and nothing about the essay I was supposed to be writing. It is things like this that make us ask ourselves: Is this really what the internet is for?  As I go off on unproductive research tangents I often wonder: Am I using the internet for its full designed purpose? The internet encompasses so much from, dating websites, to online shopping, to scientific research, but its real purpose is often inquired. Bush argues technology should work to organize and connect our data and Lee continues that in saying the connections should be like the human mind, while I would say that the purpose of the internet is for whatever you want it to be.

                Bush argues in his essay, “As We May Think”, that technology is made for progress, so that the right information can get into the right hands of the right people and then, they will help the betterment of society. He explains though, that there is so much information that sometimes it’s hard to sort through. The editor states that “men of science should turn to the massive of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge” (Editor). Bush goes on to say that these men are making mounds of research, but how is it useful if it doesn’t get in the right hands. Where will there be progress? Bush, as the inventor of the hypothetical memex, tried to do this. He tried to make a system where “any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” (Bush 7). He never succeeded in creating this, but one understands Bush’s idea. He would believe that the internet is here to organize and file our mass amounts of information in a way that they could all be connected.

 

                Tim Berners Lee explains in his book, Weaving the Web, that his invention of html was to be somewhat like the human mind. Like Bush, he wanted information to be linked together, “anything potentially connected with anything” (Lee 1).  He didn’t want the internet to be used for just one type of thing. The name Lee gave for his first codes for the internet was Enquire short for “Enquire Within upon Everything”. He makes known that the internet was intended, not just for research or science, but also for things like “buying books from Amazon.com and stocks from E-trade” and those things still aren’t “all there is to the web” (Lee 2).  He said he wanted the internet to be a place where you could go anywhere, much like how the mind can wander from subject to subject. One day Lee came home from high school and his dad was working on his speech for Basil de Ferranti. He was doing research to allow the computer to make connections how the brain does. The thought stayed with Lee that, “computers could become much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information” (Lee 4). Lee went to help make computers just that, an interconnected system of information where a random bit of information can be accessed at anytime. In the below video Lee talks about how he came to invent html through the frustration of information not being connected.

                To me obvious answer would be that the internet’s purpose is anything you want it to be. This answer seems hard to dispute. It was created so that the mass amounts of data, whether productive or not, we have compiled over the years can become organized. It is organized this way so that whoever may need to information may retrieve it. This information could be an email that a professor sends out about cancelling class or the electronic submission of money in exchange for a pair of shoes bought over a clothing website. The internet is here so that no matter who you are you can find what it is your looking for, but the “what” is up to you. I believe though that this is based off of Lee’s and Bush’s ideas. They emphasize the organization part of the internet, but it is the organization that helps us to reach this goal.

                The internet, this mass compilation of random content, is for a variety of things. While on my tangent research of Steven Anthony Lawrence, and finding his weird obsession for blue button downs, was I using the internet for what it was invented to be? I would have to say yes. The internet isn’t for this strict purpose of research. It’s for many things, including my random outbursts of unproductive research. It’s for research on Abe Lincoln and book reviews. It’s for online shopping and setting up blind dates. It’s for posting pictures on social media and for buying planes tickets. The internet is for research on the British colonization of India and finding out everything you need to know about Beans from Even Stevens.

Works Cited

                Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fischetti. "Enquire Within Uopn Everything." Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. 1-4. Print.

Vannevar, Bush. "As We May Think." As We May Think. Denys Duchier University of Ottawa, Apr. 1994. Web. 15 Oct. 2013.

Will Computers Ever Seem Human

I went to the movies this week and got there in time to do my favorite thing, watch the previews and the above preview came on. It's a movie called Her, about a man who falls in love with a computer. After watching it I could not stop thinking about how stupid that is. "No one can fall in love with a computer!", I thought. But after thinking more about it I was drawn to a few of the things we talked about in class. We have discussed intelligent computer assistants such as Siri on the iphone and how maybe one day computers will seem more human. Even now some people treat there computers like humans. They name their computers and they get mad and talk to their computers when they aren't working, all of which we talked about in class. I began to wonder: is it really far off to think that one day someone will be able to fall in love with a computer? Is it weird to think that one day people will talk to as their friends?

Adaptation to Technology

The Video above contains many interesting statistics about how much our world has changed in the last 50 years from: radio, to TV, to the internet. The facts show how much faster things are changing and spreading than they were 50 years ago. It took much less time for 50 million people to be connected by TV than by radio and even less time for 50 million people to be connected by the internet and surprisingly even less time for 50 million to be connected by Facebook. This video shows how much are world is changing, but unlike other videos it does not take a stance. I like this because it simply gives you the facts and then lets you interpret them. We can complain all we want about how our world is heading down a wrong path with technology. We can complain how people are on their phones too much, or that our families watch too much TV, but we all have the facts. The facts cannot change and we cannot change how the world is only going to get more and more dependent on technology. All you can do, and what this video urges you to do, is adapt.