Response 1 – Jake B

What is New Media?:

This article defines new media as Many-to-many interaction. The article compares new media to air travel, which has the benefits of water and land travel without having the drawbacks of either. Similarly, New media as many-to-many interaction has the personalization of interpersonal interaction while also having the wide reach of one-to-many interaction. In a many-to-many interaction, each participant has the ability to shape their own reality.

Social Media is an example of this. Each participant can send out individualized messages to a larger group of people and in return receive messages from a large group of people. This ends up creating an environment in which thousands of people can communicate effectively all at the same time. Creators can instantly get and respond to feedback on their work and consumers can personalize what types of content they see.

New Media Strategies:

Exercise 1

Disappearing language:

Solution B is a Many-to-many solution because it crowdsources the job. Instead of having a few people in charge of a large amount of information like in solution A, solution B gets smaller amounts of information from a large group of people. Solution B will also produce a more easily accessible and understandable version of the Passamaquoddy language. In this solution, the kids and their grandparents are the first many communicating the language via the website to the second group of many that want to learn it. It’s also an example of aggregating, automating and visualizing data. The data is aggregated by the website, automated by the tag cloud, and visualized in the videos.

Neglected Ruins:

Solution B is another example of crowdsourcing the job. This idea would create an interface that allows many people to provide small amounts of information to many different viewers. Solution A would be a one-to-many situation with the film crew, or director, being the one and the viewers of the DVD is the many. It also enables many explores to share what was inaccessible to many other people.

Misunderstanding Computer Animation:

Solution B is an example of DIY many-to-many communication. By teaching about how to make animations and then providing the resources to do so, it allows people to create things on their own instead of relying on others to do it for them.

A Broken Fountain:

Solution B is an example of aggregating, automating and visualizing data. It’s aggregated from the internet sources of Google images and Nat-geo, automated in the video installation and visualized by the projections.

Exercise 2:

Student Films are always set in dorms:

My idea is to create an interface that allows local businesses to reach out to student filmmakers and vice versa. It would require the students to credit the business in their project so the business gets free advertising incentive. It would also have an option to display locations via a map with a short description of what it is. Also, it would allow filmmakers to tag public locations on the map with information on what that location might be good for. Filmmakers could also show or describe what kind of work they did there. I would include an option for businesses to provide contact information and possible preferred hours for filming.

This would be an example of many-to-many communication by tapping into local networks and crowdsourcing. It brings two networks together, the local businesses and the filmmakers. It crowdsources by getting most of its information from the filmmakers and businesses involved. There is no data gathering by any of the developers.

Theater of the oppressed:

In this article, the people are oppressed by the governing high class, the class that knows how their story is told. Boal gives the power back to the people by allowing them to finish the story their own way. His ideas are entirely based on the idea of inspiring the spectator to not be a spectator at all, but to participate.

New Media accomplishes the same goal by allowing each person to customize their own perception. In the Many-to-many environment of New Media, everyone determines what content they take from and publish to the world. No two experiences will be exactly alike. Just like no two incident’s of Boal’s theater of the oppressed will be alike.

1B:

Issue: the idea of “changing the game” or “taking on the system” is a very negative and destructive idea. Often times, people protest without offering a valid solution. This ultimately results in no change.

Strategy: Create an app and website. This app will serve as a forum or message board that requires people to offer a possible solution to something they don’t like. It will have the option of being anonymous or not. Posts that get a certain amount of upvotes will be viewed by non-partisan admins. The admins will then send the posts to the people that they concern. We’ll network with people in positions of power so they can receive and respond to the feedback. Upon the release of this app, we’ll also start a social movement to inspire people to not protest blindly and make sure that they’re trying to build the system back up, rather than tear it down.

Target audience: Everyone with an opinion. We’ll use the power of social media to reach younger generations and reach out to news outlets in order to reach people that might not use social media. Our goal is to go viral. We’ll develop posters to pin to lampposts, create videos for the internet, and encourage interactivity.