Embodiment and Technology

The disembodied voice.  The meat.  Transcending the body, time and space...

From Nietzsche to Merleau-Ponty to Lackoff and Johnson, some of the best thinkers have been reminding us that there is no disembodied communication.  

While cyberspace may give us an experience of transcendence, for the most part, we're sitting in a chair using some type of date input device (usually more than one):  There's nothing disembodied about it.  Even with radio, the voice always reveals a body (this body is a sign, and may be used with all the attributes of signs; for example, you can "lie."  A person may "put on" an accent, but this is done to create a specific apperance of a body anyway).

There may even be extreme consequences of a computer-age body--eye problems and back pain come to mind of personal experiences.

Are we doomed to life of chairs?  I don't think so.  Laptops made computing portable, and tablets make computing readable.  Embodiment is becoming not just recognized, but used creatively.  The mouse may have started it, but the trackpad is not the end.  The WII was immediately used for many non-gaming applications, and many game companies (often on the cutting edge of computing) are moving to embrace embodiment.

Many of us were thrilled by the movie Minority Report, and to make matters more cool, that movie tried to show us technology that was likely to truly exist:  Speculation was built on the promises of technological innovation.

John Underkoffler is one man thinking this way.

Power and Power Point

I love digital slide presentations.  But I also love reading.  Note taking.  Re-reading. Writing.  Editing.  Re-writing.  Reading some more. You get the idea.  I'm the kind of guy who ends up in the clergy or academy.  I chose the academy.

For the past several years, the faculty of the COMM department has been thinking about what we do:  What DO we do?  What SHOULD we do? What do we have in COMMON.  How do we COMMUNE? What is COMMUNICATION?

Of course, many answers are possible.  We have been focusing on one: Story-telling. Humans are story-tellers.  We love telling-stories.  There's nothing abstract about it:  When we sing the blues; we tell a story.  When we talk about our day; we tell a story.

Most people are underwhelmed when they find that stories have an identifiable structure!  I understand.  But the structure is there (and for those who hate singularity (myself included) there are enough variations and angles to spend a lifetime working on this).

Nancy Duarte is as excited as I am. So let's watch her:

This is indeed what we are teaching, in the proverbial thousand faces. 

Please don't make a simple mistake:  This has nothing to do with us (the educators): It what we, you included, strive for in all acts of communication; it's the structure of successful communication.

And, for all who don't like structure--there is indeed a post, a post-structuralist place, for us to go and to continue thinking, growing, the untapped "country."
k

Normalization

OK.  First.  I am not a fan of normalization--social or audio.  However, it's a useful tool, and like auto-focus or auto-white balance on a camera, it has its place.

However, the use of normalization and (over) compression has led to a phenomenon called the "loudness war" and it's something we need to know.

So, let's a trip around the web, YouTube and Vimeo style and see what we can learn:

1. Anytime you can watch/listen to Bob Katz, do it: 
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCd6MHlo_iA&feature=related
2. Bob Ludwig was the king of sound; he mastered almost every album I bought in the 70's:  
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMWUOCbWp1M&feature=related
3. Loudness war
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSwLeLdkYjs&feature=related
4. Nevermind.  I mind.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v6ML2DsBfA&feature=related
5. The pro and the amateur 
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiQLmeSwtT4&feature=related

Autotune FX

Autotune has received bad press and great use (it's funny how often critics and performers disagree. I guess it's like Republicans and Democrats; it's no fun if you don't fight),

However, autotune is a great production device and a great post-production device.  Like most plug-ins, it can be used to correct sloppy performance or add flavor to a track while recording or mixing.  The way you use it (while recording, after recording, post) will make a huge difference.

Here's s decent introduction:  Don't watch if your easily offended by language.

Music and Compression

All Linkin Park songs sound alike and look alike!?  Well, that's the idea unfolded in this blog:

http://www.hometracked.com/2007/05/29/all-linkin-park-songs-look-the-same/

I don't see this as a critique of LP.  This same formula appears in Nirvana and other bands.  I'm not really interested in arguing about the "sameness" of a band's songs.  It seems to me that since the invention of popular music, one pitfall was that in order to be or remain "popular" you have to get a very large number of fans to hang with you.  I usually see bands stretching out only to loose their audience (I love bands like Jethro Tull who can make several significant changes, including genre, and flourish).

What I am interested is in those clean compression lines the author reveals.  I want my sound design students to get used to reading the compression in sound-waves visually.  So, thanks for the images; nice work.

The Gods are Inside and Out

James Hillman has said that psychopathology today is not just a problem of interior states, but rather that psyche lives inside and out:  Outside in the depressed buildings, the manic depressive commute, the schizophrenia of everyday life.  Psycho-pathologies show up not only in mind, but on the television, radio and cinema, in program, format and genre, in the characters and personalities who bring us entertainment--be it fact or fiction. 

In the lecture below, I want to pose a question to my students.  They are currently weaving their way through Freud and Jung and on their way to Lacan; their focus is media studies, and Hillman notes, time and again, that the psyche, ill or healthy (for buildings can be grand, driving a pleasure, and everyday life a joy) lives in both the form and the content of texts.  So whether we are interested in mass mediation, micromediation, or, for that matter, interpersonal mediation, we need to know mythologies we live.  

In fact, we started this class studying semiotics, and in a common way, we started in the middle of a course.  Because semiotics seeks to uncover myths, but what myths can you uncover if you don't know the myths we live?  Life is often like that.... Isn't it?

Watch Hillman, who many consider Jung and Campbell's heir apparent, speak about the gods. My question is this:  What does he mean when he mentions the politicians and the journalists?  What recognition is it that brings the audience to applause?  To answer this question you really need watch only part one, but parts two and three are equally engaging (Of course, some of you will find this totally boring.  If that's the case, hang in there. One day you will be a journalist, or politician, or, in some way The Media itself:  It's good to know what power you truly have).

http://youtu.be/iFkkQ9eq8qw

Dreams as hyper-link

Richard Dawkins revolutionized evolutionary theory by shifting the "survival of the fittest" from organisms to DNA. This strikes me as one of may "postmodern turns." Vannevar Bush, hypertext, the hyperlink, depth at the surface: These people and ideas, appearing along with Einstein, Picasso and Darpa, move communication theory from the interpersonal to the wired, molecular, interconnected, and transparent.While my analogy may be wrong, the impression I hope to make is not. Psychoanalysis, especially in the age of Lacan, is still relevant for the study of cinema.

Perhaps a movie like Paprika makes the same move, from organism to DNA, from dream as personal or collective unconscious to dream as intercommunication with the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, in its representation of the psychoanalysis of dreams.

 I'm a fan of James Hillman.  His view of the psyche as external (as well as internal), or better, as a semiotic "third text," an intersection of the real and the ideal (like the signifier and signified) expressed in the Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (another must read), supports my hypothesis.

This movie falls into my "must watch" animation file. It's an example of being able to express ideas because animation allows for expression generally too expensive for live action (one dimension of anime's genius, if I may personify, is its ability to express perception not in spite of, but because of the relative lack of industry funding.

For our class, COMM 403 MEDIA STUDIES, please read the review in the Mechadamia book series (which I highly recommend reading).

http://books.google.com/books?id=Wef0-7tdw2sC&lpg=PA326&ots=5DPcNXcMDk&dq=psychoanalysis%20anime%20paprika&pg=PA326#v=onepage&q&f=false

Is the unconscious, positing only its existence, personal (Freud), collective (Jung), linguistic (Lacan), and/or intercommunication (Paprika)?
k

IQ - EQ - Empathy - Listening

Our communication program at the local university has taught a class called "speech" for many years.  Some programs have taken one section of this class and made it a class unto itself.  That topic is "listening."  We're already pretty good at talking, writing, texting, expressing, and so on.  However, when we measure listening, reading, viewing, we see often that comprehension does not equal expectation.

People blame this on many things, I think "time anxiety" is a major factor.  Indeed, I lecture quite a bit about time--in cinema, television, video, music, radio--and the ways we live time (which is not the same thing as so-called "real" time.  We live more of a "reel" time.

Daniel Goleman always captivates me.  His book on EQ is, in my humble opinion (OK, so I'm not all that humble), a must-read for the college educated body.

See how much of this applies to you (in the following video).  Then, read, view, the blog below this one and see what connections can be drawn.

Are you Experienced?

How connected is connected? How interdependent is interdependent?  When does interdependence become dependence? What? Here...

Tiffany Shlain has made a new documentary on the (un)wired world.  Are you so connected that you've become disconnected?

Narrative and Music Video

Every once and awhile I post a blog because the data it contains might be useful later.  Here's a traditional narrative analysis, a la Todorov, using a Lady GaGa music video.
http://jsilverlake.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/researching-the-narritive-ways-of-todorov-and-propp/

COMM 203 This is a Test

1. Get your reader's attention
2. State your thesis, organizing idea, or main point of the blog
3. Substantiate your idea
4.Be sure to use multimedia and embed pictures, sounds and movies
5. Leave a lasting impression

TV as Tele-Vision

My first meditation of the year.  Here is a great example of what TV can do.  TV can allow people to tell their stories. This is a tele-vision, a vision of something broadcast over a distance, thus, a shrinking of that distance.  These stories make a difference.  When we look at world disasters, natural or man-made, we find that assistance (at least mass assistance) is given to those people and places from which we see compelling stories.  The stories, and the images, compel us to action:  Or do they?  When we see disaster after disaster, do we become numb, do we feel overloaded, overwhelmed? Worse, has TV become such a "merely" entertainment matter that it's an entertainment only venue (the TV is, I like to say, and I think I do so in the words of Tania Modleski, that TV is really a domestic appliance, and thus not much like cinema at all).  If so, can we find it in us to select a mission (even one phenomenon, such as the abuse of women in Afganistan) for us to do something about?  Our model of media criticism, at it's most simple, is observe, analyze and act.  What will you do?