hap-hap-happenin holiday
Christmas is sooo close. And I’m sooo not done my shopping. End of story.
Backing up to yesterday afternoon. We watched the beginning of an A&E documentary on death after an unabbreviated lesson on how to not use a VCR. Interestingly enough, our professor is in this documentary as one of the few scholars the video reports to for commentary and insight. I guess my mind never threw together the possibility that any of my professors may actually have some prominence. Oh well, it was a slight shock for all of us.
Thens todays I was ins my Comms class We came across two very notable topics that greatly intrigued me (side note: stupid budget cuts that killed my minor!!). The first was about the consolidation of the media industries as computer-related technology begins to throw them into the same piles [of binary code] (in other words, to a computer a book is no different than a film, they are both 0’s and 1’s although admittedly in dissimilar formats). So anyways, I was once again reminded of the many conglomerates that have attempted to truly consolidate media in all its forms (the former AOLTimeWarner, AOL encompassing the internet and computers, Time having magazines and publications, and Warner owning a huge portion of the film industry as well as a large cable provider). Not to forget Microsoft’s DotNet that, once mass-accepted, will completely monopolize all communication of any type. So that was not very comforting.
The next portion of the lecture that conquered my attention was about the internet and how it is changing communication period. Of course there are many types of communication but two main types are interpersonal (one on one) and mass communication (implementing media). So my professor asks regarding a person’s blog that he randomly searched for through Google, “is this is photo album [or diary] or a t.v. show?” That really made me think how the internet has completely reformatted our views of interpersonal communication. Instead of meeting up at a Starbucks, two people can chat online (even iChat AV) all night with apparently just the same enjoyment as in real life. And this has only been truly activating itself in the last decade. It makes me wonder what life will be like 20, 30 years from now when there will then exist a generation of people who are aware of such technology as an absolute rather than convenience. So thus I was intrigued.
And it’s cold here, rather cold. The weather forecasters forecast wintry precipitation for Wed night through the weekend. This is my woohoo.