Photography practice

I snapped these photos of a bluegrass band with my smartphone for an assignment to practice the "5 shot method" of news photography. They played near the Kennedy Center at BYU for the Study Abroad Fair. I got contact information so I plan to write a story about them for my weekly assignment, but right now I don't know what they call themselves.

Tight

Medium

Wide

Over-the-shoulder

Unusual

Response to the Forward of "Journalism Next" by Mark Briggs

Jennifer Sizemore of MSNBC, who wrote the Forward to Journalism Next was optimistic in diagnosing the journalism industry. Yes, newspapers are dying, she said. But people have a voracious news appetite nonetheless, so there will always be journalists--that is as long as those journalists find the most effective available ways to connect with them.

Since this industry will probably be a part of my career, I'm glad to think there might yet be a way to support my family in it. Sizemore points out that she transitioned from a print publication to a digital publication right before newspapers started to tank. George just lucky, I guess. I think if I was one of the thousands of laid off journalists and editors I would be irritated with her focus on the fortunate survivors. Let the dead bury the dead, she implies, The rest of us still have careers.

Alright, well now my question is how much career is out there to be had? Sure, there are hundreds of news publications online (maybe more). But how many of those can pull in the ad traffic necessary to pay their staff a living wage? Now that the news publication industry is free from the tether of physical printing and distribution, now that it is a digitally scalable commodity, I assume that it follows the exponential population rules common to digital commodities. Some people call this phenomenon the "Long Tail" (after the book by Chris Anderson). It's a logarithmic distribution.

The main idea is that a few sites dominate the market, then popularity tapers down rapidly as sites appeal to a more and more niche audience.

Here's another graph to come at the point another way. I'm rusty on math but in case you're not, here's an estimation of the logarithmic distribution of website popularity (from nngroup.com)

Add caption

My point is lets not let the myriad journalism outlets confuse us into thinking they all have the clout that allows MSNBC to pay Jennifer Sizemore a living wage. It's great talk, but let's be realistic about the fact that there is no clear economic model that can yet replace the subscription/ad combo that most publications relied on for 200 years.

Conclusion of the Summer Book Project

In May I began a project with two professors and a couple classmates to create an ebook over the summer. The theme was Digital Civilization. Summer is now over and we didn't write a book, but the project was a success in other ways. I learned a lot about both the subject at hand and content creation and collaboration. This post is a summary of the project from my point of view and contains (in the order listed):

• An overview of the team
• A timeline of the project
• The two comics I did as my final contribution
• Links to the most significant blog posts I made throughout the project
• Concluding comments

The Team

The two other students who were on board at the beginning withdrew early on because they were busy; here are pictures of the three of us who stayed with the project (with links to their twitter accounts).

Dr. Gideon Burton
(digital evangelist)

Dr. Daniel Zappala
(family history hacker)

Me
(excited student)

The Timeline:

I didn't record all of our meetings and team decisions. But here is a more-or-less accurate timeline of how the project progressed, with links to relevant blogs posts I did:

May:

The team assembles for an exploratory meeting. In attendance are Dr. Daniel Zappala, Dr. Gideon Burton, two other students, and myself. We discuss whether material created during the previous semester's Digital Civilization class can be refined into an ebook, whether we wanted to create entirely new material, and whether we want to commit to the project. 

We begin holding weekly meetings to discuss our target audience, specifics of the topic, and content.

June:

We begin toying with the idea of using a comic book format and targeting the the interested but uninformed demographic. I learn about Jaron Lanier and get really into his ideas.

July:

The work is mostly broken up into three comic we're each drawing on digiciv themes, which will be refined and combined--with more to be done later--into our finished product. I create drafts of two comics about the reality (or lack of reality) involved with virtual experiences.

Professor Burton allows me to accompany him to a lunch meeting with two businessmen who are in the webseries industry. At one point he invites them to see my comic, and they seem pleased with it. (This is not the purpose of that meeting, but I appreciated being included and getting a degree of social proof concerning my work.

August:

Fall semester at BYU starts soon, and we are all busy. The project gets shifted to the back-burner, then taken off of the stove entirely. But it had a good run.

The Products

Here are scanned versions of the two comics I drafted as my final contribution to the project. As mentioned above, my topic was "questions of identity and reality and the virtual world". The original plan was to send the drafts to some actual artist to make them look nice, but that never happened so you're seeing the unrefined versions.

Comic #1: "A Peaceful Dispute About Violence"

I cut out the material at the beginning of this one because I don't like it. We join the action as a woman has just expressed concern to her husband that his violent video games are harmful...

The daughter's comments in the bottom-left panels are illegible so I'll repeat them here:

"But you have experience in that country, don't you when you play that game? Your mind makes memories and develops patterns, especially because there's always a subconscious desire...that the game is real."

Comic #2: "A Virtual Date"

The Blog Posts

Everything I posted on this blog from May up until now was related to this project. In case you don't want to browse the archive, I've gathered links to the most important posts. First is the inaugural post, then some ideas that I got excited about and a couple comics I wrote.

The Project Begins Anew

Newsfeeds: Watch Your Diet

Technology Debate (Comic Concept)

My Chapter Ideas

Two of Jaron Lanier's Ideas

Our Moats (A Text-based Comic Concept)

The Words of Computing

A Final Word

This phase of my research and work concerning digital civilization is at an end, but I will continue to follow and study developments in this sphere. So watch this blog for updates!

Thanks to Professors Burton and Zappala for the chance to work with you. Among your gifts and generosities is the willingness to take the ideas of your students seriously. 

Words of Computing & "Defrag"

A few days ago my roommate and I discussed the importance of taking some time to unwind and relax. He said, "It's nice to just defrag once in a while you know" (or something like that.) I realized that "defrag" is a term that certainly was not used popularly before the PC era, but it perfectly describes a way that the brain operates--at least it describes a way that we imagine the brain operates.

Currently, the most appropriate metaphor for the human brain is that it is a computer . We can actually observe most of the functions of the human brain, but from personal experience and the limited reaches of science we have some idea about how it works. And so we compare it to a computer because that helps us imagine or visualize it. 

What was the most appropriate and/or popular metaphor for the brain before computers existed? Perhaps it was a steam powered machine. Maybe it was a printing press. I don't know. The point is, part of the New Aesthetic is not visible, it is vernacular. And popular technology helps people make sense of the world in new ways, asymptotically approaching the true essence of a thing.

The "Disc Defragmenter" image is from http://www.helppconline.org/tag/defrag/

The Words Of Computing

TechCrunch ran an interesting article about the nouns that our society uses to describe virtual world actions (Copy and Paste, the magnifying glass icon for zoom, streaming.) They wonder why we use outdated actions to represent computing functions and when we'll be comfortable using entirely new words to describe actions and nouns in the digital world. The whole article is interesting, but these sections sums up the point:

The simple fact is that there is a shared visual orthography in which some things are acknowledged worldwide, and this overpowers the logical suggestion to constantly update it. Many reading this would, 20 years ago, be unsure whether the icon represented saving or accessing the A: drive. Nowadays, many will never encounter portable storage in their life. Yet the diskette is firmly associated with saving changes, certainly more so than it is with removable media. So logic has nothing to do with it. Language has less to do with logic than it has to do with a shared interpretation of symbols. These symbols are widely used because they are widely understood, and they are widely understood because they are widely used... 

Maybe I lost you there. What I am saying is that every action we create in the virtual world has by necessity an analogue in the real world. And by common consent, to represent those actions we go back to certain shared experiences that will not be misinterpreted. Lately it’s been hydrological phenomena. Cloud storage. Bittorrent. Streaming. Thunderbolt, to an extent. A few of you may remember that Zunes squirted. NFC is data osmosis, though of course no one calls it that.

I also like the last point made in the article, which is that the most innovative changes in computing may be identified by the difficulty we'll have finding a good metaphor for them. If we can't easily assign a term from the physical world to it then we're stepping into new territory of action.

Perhaps this is all abstract hot air. But perhaps not.

Ominous Quotes

I ran a Google search for the phrase "the imponderable bloom" which is a phrase E.M. Forster used to describe the valuable element of direct experience that virtual intercourse cannot provide. (The quote and concept come from his short story The Machine Sleeps.) Forster must have coined the term himself because nobody else is claiming credit.

Through that search I came across a website with a small collection of quotes about virtual experience that are science-fictional and pleasantly ominous. Thank you Wikipedia user MarkLMI.

Two of Jaron Lanier's Ideas

I watched a couple more Jaron Lanier addresses today. His vision and intelligence and humanist optimism is fascinating. He is offers powerful arguments contradicting the openness movement and other dynamics of modern technology development. Here are two of his interesting remarks:

On Privacy

The Facebook model is that your lack of privacy is precisely the product that's being sold to some hypothetical advertising customer who hasn't yet appeared in a giant ritual of human erasure to make computers seem smart.

 My dad and I had an interesting discussion recently in which we wondered if the next big search engine to gain popularity will be one that has a plain, simple, predictable interface (like Google used to have) that promises to collect no data from you or use data collected by other parties to personalize your results. It would retrieve "stupid" search results (no different from anyone else who uses the same keywords). Then the burden of using knowledge to find the ideal search result would be shifted back onto the user instead of the software. People could just get better at using search operators , retain their personal information, and still get the search results they desire.