Take a look for yourself!

http://pages.pomona.edu/~edp21925/TermProject3.html

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_gets_published_should_wri...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8lvc-azCXY&feature=dir

See for your self!

http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/69013/gadgets-and-gadflies;_ylt=AvYnR3...
&
http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/58092/the-most-memorable-web-videos-o;...

Last week’s readings were all about convergence culture. The introduction talked primarily about the meaning of convergence culture as well as what the rest of the book would entail. The next two chapters were about Survivor and its internet fan base and American Idol and its advertising ploys.

How do you think current television seeks to locate, understand, and manipulate the emotional underpinnings of viewers? Draw examples from shows and episodes in particular if you can.

How are “brand communities” built? How are this community’s desires molded and commoditized by the network and its sponsors?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/movies/01crit.html
& http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/04/23/DDAR109PS...

This weekend I saw a couple of interesting things pertaining to our class. On Thursday I saw a lecture given by Alan Calpe. He was presenting his work, specifically Let’s Be Civil and Huff: A Given Give-In. It was kind of weird, but overall pretty interesting. Beside Calpe’s lecture I also attended the Richard Walter lecture on writing screenplays. Mr. Walter is a film teacher at UCLA and has written several books including Escape from Film School and he has made several appearances on the O’Reilly Factor. Here are some of his more interesting points from the lecture.

All the readings for this week dealt with some sort of minority group getting their voice heard on the Internet. Whether it was women in Laura Miller’s article “Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier” or the gay community in Steve Silberman’s “We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got E-mail” they all dealt with relatively the same ideas. However, I would like to focus on the other two articles dealing with race. To me race is a non-issue on the Internet.

I am torn about what to think about last week’s reading. The readings by Julian Dibbell and Sherry Turkle address the issue of reality in a virtual world. It is so easy to take on a new persona and enter a chat room or as a player in a MUD. This sounds innocent enough, however, it can get out of hand and wreak havoc among the participants. The issue here is the fact that, even though it is only a game or a chat room, for many, the line between reality and virtual reality can become blurred.