Click on the photo to find out what's your number.
AFP/Getty Images/EMMANUEL DUNAND
Monday, October 31, 2011
The world is at seven billion. What's your number?
On October 31, 2011, the world population hit 7 billion.
Click on the photo to find out what's your number.
AFP/Getty Images/EMMANUEL DUNAND
Click on the photo to find out what's your number.
AFP/Getty Images/EMMANUEL DUNAND
IFI7101: Final Essay
What are new standards for writing narratives with new media?
References
New media – how we show what we know in the digital age.
Jason Ohler
Jason Ohler
Modern literacy has always meant being able to both read and write narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Just being able to read is not sufficient. According to Jason Ohler, author of several publications on new media and digital storytelling, being able to read and write multiple forms of media and integrate them into a meaningful whole is the new hallmark of literacy.
Explaining narrative and new media
For a better understanding of writing narratives with new media, some explication on both concepts, „narrative“ and „new media“, is essential. A simplistic definition describes narrative as a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious; or a book, literary work, etc, containing such a story. Narrative can also be seen as the art, technique, or process of narrating. /8/ Marie-Laure Ryan (2004, p. 337) gives a more sophisticated definition characterizing a narrative text as „one that brings a world to the mind (setting) and populates it with intelligent agents (characters). These agents participate in actions and happenings (events, plot), which cause global changes in the narrative world. Narrative is thus a mental representation of causally connected states and events that captures a segment in the history of a world and of its members.“ In media terms, narrative is the coherence or organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things – we connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. /9/ Therefore, narratives play an essential role in our lives.
New media, the second fundamental concept, is a rather broad term that emerged in the later part of the 20th century to encompass the amalgamation of traditional media, such as film, images, music, spoken and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices and most importantly the Internet. /10/ The initially expensive and difficult world of new media has quickly become so inexpensive and easy to use that anyone with an average computer and a small budget is able to actively create rather than just passively consume media. The rise of new media has increased communication between people all over the world and the Internet. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media. We live in the Digital Age. What does it mean? Quoting Ohler, on a technical level: we are bathed in bits; on an emotional, humanistic level: we are immersed in stories. In other words, the Digital Age has unleashed the Storytelling Age. /13/ We all get to tell our stories in our own way on the great stage of the Internet. This is our time; quite literally as Time Magazine named „us” as the person of the year on the cover of the December 25, 2006 issue. /17/
Do new media produce new narratives?
Knowing the definitions, we can go on to pose a question whether new (digital) media also produce new narratives. Ryan (2004, p. 337) starts Chapter 12 in her book Narratives across Media: the Languages of Storytelling with the following question: „Who should we follow: George Landow, who claims that hypertext will reconfigure the narrative experience by turning readers into coauthors; Janet Murray, who regards digital media as a new stage on which old narratives will be replayed in new dimensions (as the title of her book Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests); Espen Aarseth, who thinks that the future of cybertexts lies not in storytelling but in computer games; or Katherine Hayles, who equates digital meaning with complexity, fragmentation, fluidity, resistance to totalization, aporia, paradox, emergence, or self-organizing capabilities – features more likely to bring in a post-narrative, post-human literature than to transform the basic conditions of narrativity?“
When we think of traditional narratives, we usually rely on a sequence of events. Most old media objects such as print fiction, newspapers, television shows, and cinema, normally tell stories, which have a beginning and an end. But how is it with the sequence in new media? Lev Manovich (2001, p. 194-195) argues that „after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, text, and other data records.“ According to Manovich, the fundamental forms of new media are therefore the database and the algorithm, a sequence of simple operations a computer can execute to perform a given task. In computer function, the algorithm plays process „yang“ to the database’s content „yin“; they are both necessary to the working computer. Video games present an example of the use of algorithm in new media. In pursuing the goal associated with winning a game, the player usually follows a simple implied instruction set, an algorithm. The pursuit of this goal through the algorithmic set of instructions is what gives the player the experience of a narrative.
Jenny Vogel, an artist whose work explores the world as viewed through new media technology using web cameras, blogs and Google searches as source material, introduced her 2010 exhibition in New York, The Narrative Arc: Methods of Storytelling in Visual Art, saying that „narratives are based on a sequence of events, no matter how improbable, as long as it sets off an emotional tick, to which subsequent episode can provide an answering tock.“ /20/ According to Vogel, the moving image, the graphic novel, or digital art might be the most obvious media where both text and image collide, providing a bridge between the two disciplines. The two distinct examples of new media narratives, video games and visual art, indicate the existence of a variety of different ways in which a story can be unfolded in new media environments, yet they still rely on some form of sequence and relationship, connecting the „yin“ with its „yang“ or the „tick“ with its „tock“.
But let us come back to the more ubiquitous meaning of storytelling and narratives. In everyday situations, we usually do not think in terms of algorithms, and not all of us are gifted to convery images into meaningul stories, yet we all create narratives and we all leave an imprint. Storytelling has been with us for thousands of years, but during the age of new media it has taken on new expression and new meaning. It is with the variety of digital tools that ordinary people can finally tell their own real-life stories. Within half of a century, we have shifted from the consumption based storytelling culture (the traditional mass media) to a culture that listens and tells stories. According to Ohler, the lag time between new media evolving from read-only to write-possible is shrinking dramatically. He describes the current era as the beginning of Web 3.0 – an intelligent, semantic ecosystem that inevitably we will all „write“ by virtue of how we create content. It is a read-write web within everyone’s grasp and it promises to change anything we do that is web-based – in other words, absolutely everything. /11/
Today, with just a little training, the least technical among us can create a basic weblog in minutes. With a little experience, we can turn our blogs into media-rich information sources thanks to YouTube, SlideShare and other services that make it easy for the non-technicians to produce their own media. The new media diaries substitute the traditional paper diaries. Books still exsist, but they are often read on digital devices such as Kindle or most recently the iPad, which means they must also be produced for these new formats. A recently posted YouTube video, A Magazine Is An iPad That Does Not Work, shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. /19/ Writing letters in ink can no longer compete with e-mails. School work is not scribbled in sketchbooks, instead it is posted on blogs. Essays are no longer plain text, instead students are encouraged to create digital stories integrating multiple forms of media. The idea of merging traditional storytelling with today’s digital tools is spreading worldwide and across different fields, most commonly in education.
What are new standards for writing narratives with new media?
Ryan (2004, p. 338) singles out five properties of digital media as the most fundamental that affect narrativity: reactive and interactive nature, multiple sensory and semiotic channels (multimedia capabilities), networking capabilities, volatile signs, and modularity.
These properties are used to create new media narratives, such as distributed narratives, spread across time, space and the network; sequential fragmented narratives, segmented and ordered into small chapters or tweets and made available to a broad audience; aggregated narratives, which use algorithm or search to draw the narrative together; spatial narratives, embedded into real geographical locations with itineraries for exploring the novels parallel in real and virtual world. New media offer a wide range of new ways to present stories as well as new modes of user involvement: exchanging stories in real time, impersonating a character, and participating in the collective creation of a story. Narrating in new media environments is liberating and demanding at the same time. „We increasingly have affordable and ubiquitous tools to help us communicate and enrich engaging narratives. We now need a new generation of leaders to put these tools to good use,” says John Hagel, co-chairman at Center for the Edge. /4/
A lot of discussion on new media narratives has been around its non-linearity. Various authors have questioned whether some of the new media narratives can be called narratives at all. I had a great chance to listen to Pedro Monteiro, a Portuguese graphic designer, on the INMA European Conference 2011 in Lisbon. Discussing narratives for digital distribution, he confronts these critics by bringing examples of traditional (print) narratives that are non-linear, because of physical space constraints that pages impose and the way graphic design copes with it. Pictures, text, captions, etc, all relate to the story being told, but the way the bits of the story are laid out reinforces its non-linearity. Monteiro does not focus on the timeline, but on interruptions of the narrative itself. He explains how we can prevent it on digital publishing. In a good storytelling experience, a linear one, each item that exists to aid the main story is placed in an exact location. In a digital narrative, storytellers are not obligated to choose text over audio, or pictures over video. They must choose the best way to communicate each bit, each episode. The choice should flow from the content itself. Added material for a story must be presented in a way that can either be fully explored by a reader, or moved forward, without loss for the narrative experience. The final linear narrative will be a flow of content, presented using every digital tool available. Monteiro believes that with the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, it is time to rethink how we produce and present our stories. /7/
An interesting form of new media storytelling is transmedia storytelling, also known as multiplatform storytelling. It is the technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. From a production standpoint, it involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content over multiple channels. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together, but are in narrative sync with each other. /18/ As of 2011, both traditional and dedicated transmedia entertainment studios are beginning to embrace transmedia storytelling techniques in search of a new storytelling form. Developing technologies have enabled projects to now begin to include single-player experiences in addition to real-time multiplayer experiences such as alternate reality games.
Some notable examples of transmedia storytelling include: Cathy's Book, a transmedia novel by Sean Stewart; Slide, a native transmedia experience for Fox8 TV in Australia; ReGenesis, a Canadian television series with a real-time transmedia (alternate reality game) extension that took place in sync with the episodes as they aired. To further explain this, let us take Slide. The Australian teen drama series follows the lives and exploits of five teenagers making their way into adulthood in the city of Brisbane, Queensland. The series is multi-platform and encourages the viewer to view extra content online via apps and social networking such as Facebook and Twitter. Webisodes of events that take place before and after episodes are also available on YouTube. /16/
Another form of writing narratives with new media is microblogging. I consider it quite an opposite practice. While transmedia storytelling uses multiple forms and platforms to permeate our daily lives, microblogs consist of small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links. /6/ For example, the 140 Novel, a Twitter-based novel by three people writing a single sentence each time in a single account. That is where the name 140 comes from, the character limit on Twitter. /1/ Similarly, Facebook Timeline will soon offer the social network users to tell their life story in a short but telling way, with a new kind of profile composed of the most memorable posts, images, and a new class of social apps that let the users express who they are through the things they do. /3/
These are only a few possibilities offered by new media to produce creative alternatives to a narrative experience. And it remains the storyteller’s choice to decide on the best technique to communicate the story.
Why do we need narratives so bad?
Hagel discusses narratives and their place in this post-modern era. According to Hagel, narratives provide stability and continuity in our lives. When confronted with a growing barrage of demands on our attention, they help us to filter, select and prioritize what should receive our attention. By inviting people to take initiative, narratives encourage people to lead. They also help participants construct meaning, purpose and identity for themselves, to situate participants in a broader context and to build relationships across participants. At their most profound level, narratives help to ignite and nurture passion within us. /4/
Ohler adds from the educational perspective, that being able to actively create rather than just passively consume new media is important for the obvious reason that it teaches literacy and job skills that are highly valued in a digital society. Hands-on media creation plays an important role in the development of media literacy – the ability to recognize, evaluate, and apply the techniques of media persuasion. Writing media compels reflection about reading media, which is crucial in an era in which professional media makers view young people largely in terms of market share. Thus, a new dimension of literacy is now in play – namely, the ability to adapt to new media forms and fit them into the overall media collage quickly and effectively. „Committing a bad story to digital media is like giving a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier,“ he says. /12/
Center for Digital Storytelling, an international nonprofit training, project development, and research organization, assists youth and adults around the world in using digital media tools to craft and record meaningful stories from their lives and share these stories in ways that enable learning, build community, and inspire justice. /2/ At the core of their work is a commitment to narrative, an enduring respect for the power of individual voices and a deep set of values and principles that recognize how sharing and bearing witness to stories can lead to learning, action, and positive change. Storytelling has a history rich in timeless skills, perspective and sense of audience. Good teaching is often a matter of good storytelling.
In conlusion
To conclude, I would say that new media do produce new narratives. To me the biggest and perhaps the most important difference that comes with this change is that now everyone is able to tell stories, rather than only read or listen. This fact by itself creates a variety of different narrative forms.
What does not change is the reason why we produce narratives. That is to make sense of things around us, to understand and construct meaning. Therefore, I also agree with Ryan (2004, p. 354) when she says that „digital media have no more impact on the cognitive model through which we filter texts and make sense of human action than the experiments of postmodern fiction. The texts supported by digital media may satisfy to various degrees the universal cognitive model, or they may produce creative alternatives to a narrative experience, but they do not and cannot change the basic conditions of narrativity.” No matter how high tech we become, telling stories to each other orally will endure as one of our primary and most powerful forms of communication. It will always be an important skill to have in the workplace, in our communities and in our schools. „Bottom line: No matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, the future of digital storytelling will involve writing and conventional forms of literacy,“ says Ohler. /12/ A short YouTube video, Change Your Words, Change Your World, beautifully empasizes this powerful role of words. /15/
However, digital media affect narratives. They offer new modes of user involvement and new things to do with narrative: exchange stories in real time, impersonate a character, and participate in the collective creation of a story. They also produce new ways to present stories, which necessitate new interpretive strategies on the part of users. However, the impact of digitality on narrative is not a matter of developing a new logic but, rather, a matter of finding the right fit between the medium and the form and substance of the narrative content. Technological innovations liberate new narrative energies and exploit new possibilities, but „the survival of narrative does not depend on its ability to adapt itself to new media. Rather, it is the future of new media as a form of entertainment that depends on their ability to develop their new forms of narrativity,” concludes Ryan (2004, p. 356).
Explaining narrative and new media
For a better understanding of writing narratives with new media, some explication on both concepts, „narrative“ and „new media“, is essential. A simplistic definition describes narrative as a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious; or a book, literary work, etc, containing such a story. Narrative can also be seen as the art, technique, or process of narrating. /8/ Marie-Laure Ryan (2004, p. 337) gives a more sophisticated definition characterizing a narrative text as „one that brings a world to the mind (setting) and populates it with intelligent agents (characters). These agents participate in actions and happenings (events, plot), which cause global changes in the narrative world. Narrative is thus a mental representation of causally connected states and events that captures a segment in the history of a world and of its members.“ In media terms, narrative is the coherence or organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things – we connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. /9/ Therefore, narratives play an essential role in our lives.
Do new media produce new narratives?
Knowing the definitions, we can go on to pose a question whether new (digital) media also produce new narratives. Ryan (2004, p. 337) starts Chapter 12 in her book Narratives across Media: the Languages of Storytelling with the following question: „Who should we follow: George Landow, who claims that hypertext will reconfigure the narrative experience by turning readers into coauthors; Janet Murray, who regards digital media as a new stage on which old narratives will be replayed in new dimensions (as the title of her book Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests); Espen Aarseth, who thinks that the future of cybertexts lies not in storytelling but in computer games; or Katherine Hayles, who equates digital meaning with complexity, fragmentation, fluidity, resistance to totalization, aporia, paradox, emergence, or self-organizing capabilities – features more likely to bring in a post-narrative, post-human literature than to transform the basic conditions of narrativity?“
When we think of traditional narratives, we usually rely on a sequence of events. Most old media objects such as print fiction, newspapers, television shows, and cinema, normally tell stories, which have a beginning and an end. But how is it with the sequence in new media? Lev Manovich (2001, p. 194-195) argues that „after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, text, and other data records.“ According to Manovich, the fundamental forms of new media are therefore the database and the algorithm, a sequence of simple operations a computer can execute to perform a given task. In computer function, the algorithm plays process „yang“ to the database’s content „yin“; they are both necessary to the working computer. Video games present an example of the use of algorithm in new media. In pursuing the goal associated with winning a game, the player usually follows a simple implied instruction set, an algorithm. The pursuit of this goal through the algorithmic set of instructions is what gives the player the experience of a narrative.
Jenny Vogel, an artist whose work explores the world as viewed through new media technology using web cameras, blogs and Google searches as source material, introduced her 2010 exhibition in New York, The Narrative Arc: Methods of Storytelling in Visual Art, saying that „narratives are based on a sequence of events, no matter how improbable, as long as it sets off an emotional tick, to which subsequent episode can provide an answering tock.“ /20/ According to Vogel, the moving image, the graphic novel, or digital art might be the most obvious media where both text and image collide, providing a bridge between the two disciplines. The two distinct examples of new media narratives, video games and visual art, indicate the existence of a variety of different ways in which a story can be unfolded in new media environments, yet they still rely on some form of sequence and relationship, connecting the „yin“ with its „yang“ or the „tick“ with its „tock“.
But let us come back to the more ubiquitous meaning of storytelling and narratives. In everyday situations, we usually do not think in terms of algorithms, and not all of us are gifted to convery images into meaningul stories, yet we all create narratives and we all leave an imprint. Storytelling has been with us for thousands of years, but during the age of new media it has taken on new expression and new meaning. It is with the variety of digital tools that ordinary people can finally tell their own real-life stories. Within half of a century, we have shifted from the consumption based storytelling culture (the traditional mass media) to a culture that listens and tells stories. According to Ohler, the lag time between new media evolving from read-only to write-possible is shrinking dramatically. He describes the current era as the beginning of Web 3.0 – an intelligent, semantic ecosystem that inevitably we will all „write“ by virtue of how we create content. It is a read-write web within everyone’s grasp and it promises to change anything we do that is web-based – in other words, absolutely everything. /11/
Today, with just a little training, the least technical among us can create a basic weblog in minutes. With a little experience, we can turn our blogs into media-rich information sources thanks to YouTube, SlideShare and other services that make it easy for the non-technicians to produce their own media. The new media diaries substitute the traditional paper diaries. Books still exsist, but they are often read on digital devices such as Kindle or most recently the iPad, which means they must also be produced for these new formats. A recently posted YouTube video, A Magazine Is An iPad That Does Not Work, shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. /19/ Writing letters in ink can no longer compete with e-mails. School work is not scribbled in sketchbooks, instead it is posted on blogs. Essays are no longer plain text, instead students are encouraged to create digital stories integrating multiple forms of media. The idea of merging traditional storytelling with today’s digital tools is spreading worldwide and across different fields, most commonly in education.
What are new standards for writing narratives with new media?
Ryan (2004, p. 338) singles out five properties of digital media as the most fundamental that affect narrativity: reactive and interactive nature, multiple sensory and semiotic channels (multimedia capabilities), networking capabilities, volatile signs, and modularity.
These properties are used to create new media narratives, such as distributed narratives, spread across time, space and the network; sequential fragmented narratives, segmented and ordered into small chapters or tweets and made available to a broad audience; aggregated narratives, which use algorithm or search to draw the narrative together; spatial narratives, embedded into real geographical locations with itineraries for exploring the novels parallel in real and virtual world. New media offer a wide range of new ways to present stories as well as new modes of user involvement: exchanging stories in real time, impersonating a character, and participating in the collective creation of a story. Narrating in new media environments is liberating and demanding at the same time. „We increasingly have affordable and ubiquitous tools to help us communicate and enrich engaging narratives. We now need a new generation of leaders to put these tools to good use,” says John Hagel, co-chairman at Center for the Edge. /4/
A lot of discussion on new media narratives has been around its non-linearity. Various authors have questioned whether some of the new media narratives can be called narratives at all. I had a great chance to listen to Pedro Monteiro, a Portuguese graphic designer, on the INMA European Conference 2011 in Lisbon. Discussing narratives for digital distribution, he confronts these critics by bringing examples of traditional (print) narratives that are non-linear, because of physical space constraints that pages impose and the way graphic design copes with it. Pictures, text, captions, etc, all relate to the story being told, but the way the bits of the story are laid out reinforces its non-linearity. Monteiro does not focus on the timeline, but on interruptions of the narrative itself. He explains how we can prevent it on digital publishing. In a good storytelling experience, a linear one, each item that exists to aid the main story is placed in an exact location. In a digital narrative, storytellers are not obligated to choose text over audio, or pictures over video. They must choose the best way to communicate each bit, each episode. The choice should flow from the content itself. Added material for a story must be presented in a way that can either be fully explored by a reader, or moved forward, without loss for the narrative experience. The final linear narrative will be a flow of content, presented using every digital tool available. Monteiro believes that with the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, it is time to rethink how we produce and present our stories. /7/
An interesting form of new media storytelling is transmedia storytelling, also known as multiplatform storytelling. It is the technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. From a production standpoint, it involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content over multiple channels. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together, but are in narrative sync with each other. /18/ As of 2011, both traditional and dedicated transmedia entertainment studios are beginning to embrace transmedia storytelling techniques in search of a new storytelling form. Developing technologies have enabled projects to now begin to include single-player experiences in addition to real-time multiplayer experiences such as alternate reality games.
Some notable examples of transmedia storytelling include: Cathy's Book, a transmedia novel by Sean Stewart; Slide, a native transmedia experience for Fox8 TV in Australia; ReGenesis, a Canadian television series with a real-time transmedia (alternate reality game) extension that took place in sync with the episodes as they aired. To further explain this, let us take Slide. The Australian teen drama series follows the lives and exploits of five teenagers making their way into adulthood in the city of Brisbane, Queensland. The series is multi-platform and encourages the viewer to view extra content online via apps and social networking such as Facebook and Twitter. Webisodes of events that take place before and after episodes are also available on YouTube. /16/
Another form of writing narratives with new media is microblogging. I consider it quite an opposite practice. While transmedia storytelling uses multiple forms and platforms to permeate our daily lives, microblogs consist of small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links. /6/ For example, the 140 Novel, a Twitter-based novel by three people writing a single sentence each time in a single account. That is where the name 140 comes from, the character limit on Twitter. /1/ Similarly, Facebook Timeline will soon offer the social network users to tell their life story in a short but telling way, with a new kind of profile composed of the most memorable posts, images, and a new class of social apps that let the users express who they are through the things they do. /3/
These are only a few possibilities offered by new media to produce creative alternatives to a narrative experience. And it remains the storyteller’s choice to decide on the best technique to communicate the story.
Why do we need narratives so bad?
Hagel discusses narratives and their place in this post-modern era. According to Hagel, narratives provide stability and continuity in our lives. When confronted with a growing barrage of demands on our attention, they help us to filter, select and prioritize what should receive our attention. By inviting people to take initiative, narratives encourage people to lead. They also help participants construct meaning, purpose and identity for themselves, to situate participants in a broader context and to build relationships across participants. At their most profound level, narratives help to ignite and nurture passion within us. /4/
Ohler adds from the educational perspective, that being able to actively create rather than just passively consume new media is important for the obvious reason that it teaches literacy and job skills that are highly valued in a digital society. Hands-on media creation plays an important role in the development of media literacy – the ability to recognize, evaluate, and apply the techniques of media persuasion. Writing media compels reflection about reading media, which is crucial in an era in which professional media makers view young people largely in terms of market share. Thus, a new dimension of literacy is now in play – namely, the ability to adapt to new media forms and fit them into the overall media collage quickly and effectively. „Committing a bad story to digital media is like giving a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier,“ he says. /12/
Center for Digital Storytelling, an international nonprofit training, project development, and research organization, assists youth and adults around the world in using digital media tools to craft and record meaningful stories from their lives and share these stories in ways that enable learning, build community, and inspire justice. /2/ At the core of their work is a commitment to narrative, an enduring respect for the power of individual voices and a deep set of values and principles that recognize how sharing and bearing witness to stories can lead to learning, action, and positive change. Storytelling has a history rich in timeless skills, perspective and sense of audience. Good teaching is often a matter of good storytelling.
In conlusion
To conclude, I would say that new media do produce new narratives. To me the biggest and perhaps the most important difference that comes with this change is that now everyone is able to tell stories, rather than only read or listen. This fact by itself creates a variety of different narrative forms.
What does not change is the reason why we produce narratives. That is to make sense of things around us, to understand and construct meaning. Therefore, I also agree with Ryan (2004, p. 354) when she says that „digital media have no more impact on the cognitive model through which we filter texts and make sense of human action than the experiments of postmodern fiction. The texts supported by digital media may satisfy to various degrees the universal cognitive model, or they may produce creative alternatives to a narrative experience, but they do not and cannot change the basic conditions of narrativity.” No matter how high tech we become, telling stories to each other orally will endure as one of our primary and most powerful forms of communication. It will always be an important skill to have in the workplace, in our communities and in our schools. „Bottom line: No matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, the future of digital storytelling will involve writing and conventional forms of literacy,“ says Ohler. /12/ A short YouTube video, Change Your Words, Change Your World, beautifully empasizes this powerful role of words. /15/
However, digital media affect narratives. They offer new modes of user involvement and new things to do with narrative: exchange stories in real time, impersonate a character, and participate in the collective creation of a story. They also produce new ways to present stories, which necessitate new interpretive strategies on the part of users. However, the impact of digitality on narrative is not a matter of developing a new logic but, rather, a matter of finding the right fit between the medium and the form and substance of the narrative content. Technological innovations liberate new narrative energies and exploit new possibilities, but „the survival of narrative does not depend on its ability to adapt itself to new media. Rather, it is the future of new media as a form of entertainment that depends on their ability to develop their new forms of narrativity,” concludes Ryan (2004, p. 356).
References
- 140 Novel. twitter.com/140novel. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Center for Digital Storytelling. www.storycenter.org. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Facebook Timeline. www.facebook.com/about/timeline. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Hagel, John. The Pull of Narrative – In Search of Persistent Context edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2011/05/the-pull-of-narrative-in-search-of-persistent-context.html. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. The MIT Press, 2001. 354 pages.
- Microblogging. Wikipedia.org. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Monteiro, Pedro. Narratives for Digital Distribution. digital-distribution.org/2011/07/03/narratives-for-digital-distribution. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
- Narrative. Dictionary.com. dictionary.reference.com/browse/narrative. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
- Narrative. Mediaknowall.com. www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevkeyconcepts/alevelkeycon.php?pageID=narrative. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
- New media. Wikipedia.org. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
- Ohler, Jason. Beyond Words: New Media Literacy, Fluency and Assessment in Education. www.jasonohler.com/storytelling/beyondwords.cfm. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Ohler, Jason. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity. Part I – Storytelling, Literacy and Learning. www.jasonohler.com/storytelling/storyeducation.cfm. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Ohler, Jason. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity. Part II – The Art of Storytelling. www.jasonohler.com/storytelling/storymaking.cfm. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 422 pages.
- Sethagardner. The Power of Words. YouTube. youtu.be/Wgi0t2ap-us. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Slide. www.fox8.tv/shows/slide. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Time Magazine. Cover of the December 25, 2006 issue.
- Transmedia storytelling. Wikipedia.org. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmedia_storytelling. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- UserExperiencesWorks. A Magazine Is An iPad That Does Not Work. YouTube. youtu.be/aXV-yaFmQNk. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- Vogel, Jenny. The Narrative Arc: Methods of Storytelling in Visual Art. untonthesquare.unt.edu/narrative-arc-methods-storytelling-visual-art. Retrieved October 1, 2011.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
LG PenTouch TV brings your family ultimate experience
It's a good time to be a stylus fan. Not only has Samsung debuted its handwriting-friendly Series 7 Slate and Galaxy Note tablets, but LG is also bringing the stylus into the living room with its new series of PenTouch plasma TVs. Available in both 50-inch and 60-inch varieties, each TV comes with a pair of Touch Pens that let you either control the TV and included software like a calendar and photo gallery, or simply draw on it to your heart's content. As if that wasn't enough, the top-end 60-inch model is also a 3D TV, and include one pair of active shutter glasses – it'll run you $2,199, while the non-3D models come in at $1,699 and $1,099. Unfortunately, you'll also have to supply your own Windows PC to take full advantage of that touch-functionality.
According to the product description on LG's website, the PZ850, LG PenTouch TV series brings your family ultimate experience through the worlds's first interaction moment you dreamed about. It features a revolutionary Touch Pen which puts the power of imagination in our hands.
LG PenTouch TVs will be available in Estonia from November 2011, says Forte.
According to the product description on LG's website, the PZ850, LG PenTouch TV series brings your family ultimate experience through the worlds's first interaction moment you dreamed about. It features a revolutionary Touch Pen which puts the power of imagination in our hands.
LG PenTouch TVs will be available in Estonia from November 2011, says Forte.
Monday, October 24, 2011
One world. 24 hours. 6 billion perpectives
On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in Life in a Day, a historic cinematic experiment to create a user-generated feature film about a single day on earth.
Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80 000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day.
The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4500 hours of footage in 80 000 submissions from 140 nations.
Coming October 28, watch Life in a Day on YouTube.
Read more about Life in a Day here.
Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80 000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day.
The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4500 hours of footage in 80 000 submissions from 140 nations.
Coming October 28, watch Life in a Day on YouTube.
Read more about Life in a Day here.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Skype and Sensibility: Estonia Lives the European Dream
By Ralf Hoppe and Jan Puhl
SPIEGEL ONLINE
The Estonians, with little debt, an enthusiastic attitude toward Europe and a stoic approach to austerity measures, are a model EU nation in the midst of a crisis. They live in a digital republic defined by a business-friendly atmosphere and government transparency, an image that is attracting European expats.
When a Greek leaves a sunny country filled with olive trees, magnificent beaches and warm sea foam, when he leaves a place where summer lasts for seven months and moves to a country where he is held captive by a seemingly endless winter, it's bound to raise a few questions. Some relate to the country he has left, but his new home raises even more questions. And there is one question that affects both countries: Why is the one society driving people away, while the other draws them in?
Loukas Nakosmatis, a friendly, stout Greek with a three-day beard, the chef and owner of "Artemis," answers this question with an entire story, his own war of the roses. The 46-year-old began developing his business four years ago while he was living in Athens, he says. It involved importing flowers from the Netherlands -- mostly roses, tulips and a few exotic varieties -- on overnight cargo flights. He intended to sell them in Athens, a dusty city of stone walls and buildings whose residents are desperate for green plants and fresh flowers.
Nakosmatis signed contracts and statements of intent with three or four dozen flower shops that wanted to buy his flowers. The profit margin for flowers is large, says Nakosmatis, a factor of 10 or even 20 percent, and it would have been enough money for everyone, including the retailers and him as an importer. It sounded like a brilliant plan, at least on paper.
But it was a trap, he says. After a year, Nakosmatis had receivables of about €30,000 ($40,000), and after a year-and-a-half they had gone up to €45,000. Almost all of his buyers owed him money. They had recognized his weakness: He was under pressure to unload his product while it was still fresh. You have to sell a rose, says Nakosmatis, quoting a Greek saying, or it will sell you, because it dies.
His customers used every trick in the book. They would have him show up at their shops with a delivery van full of flowers when they knew that they would be away, or they would say that they happened to be out of cash and would promise to pay him later, on another day, or by the next Monday -- but then they kept putting him off, says Nakosmatis.
Moving to Estonia
The retailers soon took it for granted that they could buy his flowers on credit. In the end, 43 out of 46 flower shops owed him money. He eventually gave up hope and fled to Estonia, taking a series of detours to get there. His customers still owe him €45,000, which he owes his bank, which probably owes other banks.
He describes it as a chain reaction straight across Europe. But couldn't he go to court and sue his customers for his money? He laughs bitterly. You should only go to court when you can afford it, he says, quoting another Greek saying.
As he tells his story, Nakosmatis is sitting outside under a blue evening sky, with Elias, Kostas and Krikor, fellow Greek expatriates, in front of the "Artemis," a small street restaurant he has opened in the pedestrian zone of the Estonian capital Tallinn. The business is going well, and Nakosmatis has begun to pay off his debts. A waiter is serving the guests at the next table: souvlaki, a mixed grill platter, Ouzo and Greek salad.
It's one of the few summer evenings in Tallinn when it's warm enough to eat outside. Half of the dozen or so small tables in his restaurant are taken by Japanese, Finns, Danes and Dutchmen, but there are no Estonians. A meal at his restaurant is too expensive for them, says Nakosmatis. Then he describes the two Estonian women he hired as waitresses.
"They are hardworking, honest and never late," he says. The group of Greek men falls silent for a moment. "Strange country," says Elias.
The Little Things
Just what is it that makes such a country work? What's so great about Estonia?
"Muchas cosas pequeñas," or many little things, says Spaniard Naphtali Peral. He says that he established his company here in only half a day, mainly online. The record for establishing a company, he adds, is only 18 minutes. In other words, the government doesn't say: Hey, Peral, who do you think you are, starting a company, just like that? No, he says, the state actually encourages entrepreneurship, and says things like: So you have an idea, Peral! Go for it! And then he says that it takes him 20 minutes to prepare his semi-annual tax return, and that when it was time to slash the government budget, Estonia's cabinet ministers started with their own salaries.
"And they weren't making very much to begin with. I mean, these aren't the people who are filling their pockets," he says. "Some of them are really smart, capable people, who could earn a lot more in other jobs!"
Peral owns a small language coaching company. He gives courses, trains managers and advises film producers looking to work in the Baltic countries. Peral is from AlmerÃa in Spain's Andalusia region, where he completed high school and attended university. He says that a few of his fellow students were truly dim-witted -- and they were the ones who went into politics.
"And what did our politicians do the minute they were in office?" he asks. "They ordered themselves an official car. Likely a BMW … preferably with a chauffeur. And they smeared gel into their hair, bought dark suits and were constantly on the road, dedicating buildings, touring sites or giving important speeches that someone else had written. But in that time, they could just as easily have worked for the country and for the people who voted for them."
And is everything better in Estonia, Señor Peral?
"Well, for a Spaniard the people here are rather cold," he says. "I get more hugs and kisses on a single day in Spain than I do here in a year. On the other hand, the business climate is fair and open, and you can trust the police, politicians and bureaucrats."
'We Wanted a Transparent State'
But when one asks Juhan Parts, the country's economics minister, what makes Estonia different, he gives a short answer: nothing. Estonia, says Parts, is a small but perfectly normal country. It's so normal, he says, that it can be discussed in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
In the middle of this year, two rating agencies, Standard & Poor's and Fitch, upgraded Estonia's credit rating. The country had a budget surplus of €115 million in the first two quarters, and it is expected to virtually balance its budget for the entire year. Government debt is about 6.6 percent of the gross domestic product, as compared with 120 percent in Italy, 160 percent in Greece and 80 percent in Germany. In the first two quarters of 2011, the Estonian economy grew at an annualized rate of 8 percent.
What could Greeks, Germans and Italians learn something from the 1.4 million Estonians? "Learn? Now that's a funny thought!" Parts says. "Hey, what do you think about the table back there, under the trees? Go ahead and sit down. I'll get us some coffee. Do you want one of these chocolate things?"
Parts, a 45-year-old born in Tallinn, was the founder of his party, became prime minister and is now economics minister -- an unusual minister, at that.
The garden café is a self-service operation, so he gets in line and waits his turn. Then he orders two coffees and two chocolate pastries. He has come to the appointment alone, without a bodyguard, staff members or a spokesman -- and in his family car. "We want to keep expenses down," he says.
When Parts was prime minister, he had all ministers' bills, notes and files stored in electronic databases, creating Europe's first completely paperless cabinet table.
Parts is vigorous, blonde, and athletic, but seems tired. He tries to conceal a yawn, explaining that he and his wife have just had their fourth child and nights have been short. "Comparisons are always difficult," he says. "But when we had finally escaped from Soviet socialism, we were sick and tired of government centralism. We wanted precisely the opposite in all respects: We wanted a transparent state. A country that isn't constantly intervening, nationalizing businesses, placing a bureaucracy above everything and imposing rules on people in every respect."
Clearing the Way for Achievers
But doesn't the government have to help those on the losing end of social change? Parts sighs and pulls out a pack of Kent cigarettes. But when he sees the photographer about to take a picture, he hesitates and puts them back in his pocket, smiling triumphantly at the photographer.
Of course, he says, it's important to help a society's losers, the ones who are left behind. It would be wonderful, he adds, to have a fantastic healthcare system and offer social guarantees for every emergency. "But you have to have the money. We don't have it. Our average monthly income is €800. So we have to reflect on what's important for a society's development. It's the top performers, the successful ones. Ideas! Companies! Products! If all you do is administer, nothing comes of it. The state must clear the way for those who want to achieve something. That's the function of the state."
When the photographer leaves, he lights a cigarette, inhales and narrows his eyes. "I don't want to pass judgment on Germany or Greece. All I can say is that Estonia is contributing its part of the bailout fund, even though our average income is smaller than that of the Greeks. And that, by the way, is a bitter pill to swallow for many Estonians."
He puts out his cigarette and glances at the clock. "Hey, are you familiar with Skype?"
Part 2: Nothing to Lose
When the Soviet system collapsed almost exactly 20 years ago, the Estonians crept out from under the ruins, declared independence and reinvented themselves, making sure that their legal system, administration, legislature and economic system were as far from socialist as possible. It helped that in 1991 Estonia was run-down, insignificant and had a small population. The Estonians had nothing to lose.
First they privatized all government-owned businesses that were operating at a profit, and closed all factories that were not profitable. Then they attracted investors and tourists by transforming the center of Tallinn into a Medieval Disneyland, complete with cobblestone streets, bell towers and brightly colored townhouses and guildhalls. Today visitors stumble from restaurants to souvenir shops, buying gourmet chocolate, knit caps, reindeer salami and amber, even though there is virtually no amber in all of Estonia. Japanese tourists photograph peroxide-blonde waitresses in their medieval-style outfits, the Russians buy gold jewelry and the Finns come to stock up on vodka.
Estonia finally joined the euro zone this January. The euro had always been the country's declared goal. In the last few years, starting in 2008, the Estonians had fought their way through the worst economic crisis they had ever seen, triggered by the global financial crisis and the bursting of the local real estate bubble. The economy shrank by 14 percent in 2009.
Then three things happened. First, the government announced a harsh austerity program. The government bureaucracy was thinned out, healthcare and social services were cut back, and even the streetlights in Tallinn were switched off at 3:30 in the morning. Businesses reduced wages by up to 40 percent, with the promise they would be increased as soon as the economy improved. The government did not pump borrowed funds into the economic cycle. Instead, it did what economists call internal devaluation.
The second -- and oddest -- development here was that the Estonians stoically accepted these measures. There was no unrest and no protests.
The third thing that happened was the positive outcome of this blood, sweat and tears strategy. Last year, Estonia easily satisfied the Maastricht criteria. In fact, its government finances were sounder than anywhere else in the European Union.
The Shining Example
And while the rest of the euro countries tended to see the common currency as more of a curse than a blessing, the Estonians were unwavering. They celebrated the introduction of the euro. Today a tattoo artist named Elena, who works at the Viru Tattoo Studio, offers a special price of €45 to tattoo the image of the euro coin onto a customer's upper arm or neck. It takes 20 minutes.
"You have to see Skype," says the minister. "It's nearby. It's a real Estonian story."
Skype's offices are in a five-story building in a Tallinn industrial park near the university on the city's outskirts. The drab gray building couldn't be more inconspicuous, but it houses the think tank behind one of the wildest business concepts of the last decade: Why don't people make phone calls via the Internet? It would be much cheaper! And why don't people make calls the way the characters do on the TV show Star Trek, by simply looking at each other through a camera?
It took four Estonian software developers three years to write the complicated programs that made the idea a reality. Microsoft just bought Skype, and the concept, for $8.5 billion. Nowadays it's easy to log in to Skype and call someone in Australia for free. In March, about 30 million people were logged on simultaneously for the first time. Eight years after it was founded, the service now has 170 million users -- a communications club of sorts. Sten Tamkivi, Skype's general manager, was one of the first users. He even has a club membership number: User 59.
He is 33, pale, overworked and happy. Call me Sten, he says. Everyone is on a first-name basis here. On a tour of the company's enormous open offices, visitors see young men with ponytails and women with unusual glasses slumped behind laptops. Sten points out the pool table, where two men with goatees and Black Sabbath T-shirts are playing, along with the computer game corner. He also steps over children. Skype employees can simply bring their children to work. There are toys everywhere. Finally, Tamkivi shows us the company sauna. Throughout the tour, he periodically rattles off figures.
Skype is free, with the exception of a few special services, which provide annual sales of $800 million.
The network is the idea behind the whole thing, says Tamkivi. Those who participate, by logging in, form a node. Those who use the network are able to benefit from the computing capacity of the network. At the same time, users contribute to the network by making their computing capacity available to the network. This alchemistic trick is made possible by highly complex software, which operates in the background, tapping into all logged in computers, linking them and using them for transport operations.
Compressing, fine-tuning and optimizing, that's our job, says Tamkivi. The technical idea behind Skype is like a motto for Europe: By helping others, you help yourself. Is Skype something of a metaphor for Estonia?
'Europe Has Too Many Restrictions'
"We had no money, so we had to come up with something. We built our concept on three pillars: communication in networks, the idea of limitlessness, and the future. We started small and built up from there. The more people participate, the more powerful the network becomes."
What can Europe learn from Skype? He laughs. "Europe? I'm not smart enough for that sort of a question. I can't answer it as a Skype manager, only as a citizen of Europe. Well, in many European countries we have too many restrictions, prohibitions, lobbyists and people protecting vested rights. Countries must act as simply as people think, using the same principles," he says. "My great-grandfather, for example, was a farmer. When he planned his year from an economic standpoint, he looked at what he had, and what he could spend for seed, equipment and a horse. It was a very simple calculation: This is how I earn, and this is how much I spend. Realistic. When you grow up here, in this climate, you think that way. The next winter will come, even if you protest against it. But you still need naïve hopes and dreams."
What are Estonia's dreams about?
"I would say they're about Europe. We have always wanted to be part of it. Here in Estonia, we have always dreamed of Europe and believed in Europe," he says. "We thought: Scandinavia, Northern Europe, that's where we belong. That's our world."
Despite its successes, Estonia is not an economic miracle. The country has relatively few exports, mostly semi-finished products with little added value. Productivity is not particularly high, with Estonia's GDP per capita at about 40 percent of the EU average. The country wants to attract industrious Europeans, including hardworking people like the Greek restaurant owner, Loukas Nakosmatis, and the Spanish entrepreneur, Naphtali Peral. It wants everyone in Europe to know that there is a small, smart nation far in the north where life is good, even if earnings are not record-breaking.
The Smart Car of Europe
The man who is trying to inculcate Estonia with a faith in the future is tall, bald and athletic. He studied mathematics, founded companies, sold them and made lots of money. His name is Linnar Viik, and he is Estonia's image creator. He served as an advisor to the first government, in 1991, acting discreetly in the background.
In the early afternoon, Viik packs his two children into his black Land Rover and drives out to the Viimsi Peninsula, where his father lives.
A few years ago, after his divorce, Viik decided that he wouldn't work more than 100 days a year. He wanted to simplify his life and spend time with his children. It's worked very well so far, he says. He taught at the university after selling the software company he had founded in the 1990s. Today he sits on the boards of various Scandinavian banks that have invested in Estonia. He is also a collector of Stratocaster electric guitars and art.
It was Viik who came up with the image of "e-Estonia," a digital, fully interconnected, ultramodern country.
When Viik was studying mathematics, he knew that there were old Soviet-era computers the size of closets standing around in the institute where he worked. There were also three Bulgarian-made computers in the basement. He brought together the computers, made an appointment with the prime minister and made him an offer he couldn't refuse. He asked for the item in the government's budget that was reserved for photocopiers and paper. He used the money to buy a small carload of PCs, and then he convinced politicians to make their work paperless for two reasons. First, there were the savings his plan would generate. More important, however, was the symbolism of the project. WLAN zones were set up throughout the country. Viik had large traffic signs made that read: "Attention: WLAN zone!" The right to Internet access at public libraries was written into the constitution.
If Europe's old industrialized nations are like sedans, large, sedate and comfortable, Estonia was to be like the Smart car, battery-driven but bare-bones, without power windows.
In the evening, Viik and his children return from his father's house with four buckets of plums that they leave with his father, who makes plum jam and plum wine. He puts his children to bed and then spends a few hours at his laptop. The next morning, he attends a reception for the Dalai Lama at the Estonian Academy of Sciences on Toompea Hill, in the historic district. Then he takes the ferry to Helsinki to attend a board meeting at NIB Bank.
He returns promptly, one-and-a-half days later, picks up his children from school and serves them the lunch he has prepared: potatoes, vegetables and a little pickled fish. Viik is an image consultant who knows how image consultants are supposed to live. For dessert, he serves the pale green plums he and his children picked, the ones his daughter likes so much.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Saturday, October 15, 2011
A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work
Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message. Humble tribute to Steve Jobs, by the most important person: a baby.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Letting Facebook Tell Your Story
Since the beginning of Facebook, your profile has been the place where you tell your story. People use it to share everything from the small stuff, like their thoughts on an article, to the most important events of their lives, like the photos of their wedding or the birth of their child.
The evolution of your profile
Back in the early days of Facebook, your profile was pretty basic – just your name, a photo, where you went to school... stuff you'd cover in the first five minutes you met someone. Over time, your profile evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today.
But since the focus is on the most recent things you posted, more important stuff slips off the page. The photos of your graduation get replaced by updates about what you had for breakfast. Say you're catching up with an old friend – would you rather find out that they had eggs this morning, or hear about their new dream job?
The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish. The only way to find the posts that matter is to click "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page. Again. And again.
Imagine if there was an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place.
By Samuel W. Lessin, a product manager at Facebook, looking forward to adding the photo of his elephant-powered wedding to his timeline
Facebook Timeline is to be launched soon...
The evolution of your profile
Back in the early days of Facebook, your profile was pretty basic – just your name, a photo, where you went to school... stuff you'd cover in the first five minutes you met someone. Over time, your profile evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today.
But since the focus is on the most recent things you posted, more important stuff slips off the page. The photos of your graduation get replaced by updates about what you had for breakfast. Say you're catching up with an old friend – would you rather find out that they had eggs this morning, or hear about their new dream job?
The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish. The only way to find the posts that matter is to click "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page. Again. And again.
Imagine if there was an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place.
By Samuel W. Lessin, a product manager at Facebook, looking forward to adding the photo of his elephant-powered wedding to his timeline
Facebook Timeline is to be launched soon...
Thursday, October 6, 2011
iSad
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."
On October 5, 2011, on Apple's corporate website
R.I.P.,
Steve Jobs.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Digital Interactive Audio
Acid house is a sub-genre of house music that emphasizes a repetitive, hypnotic and trance-like style, often with samples or spoken lines rather than sung lyrics. Acid house's core electronic squelch sounds were developed around the mid-1980s, particularly by DJs from Chicago who experimented with the Roland TB-303 electronic synthesizer-sequencer. Acid house spread to the United Kingdom and continental Europe, where it was played by DJs in the acid house and later rave scenes. By the late 1980s, copycat tracks and acid house remixes brought the style into the mainstream, where it had some influence on pop and dance styles.
Ableton Live is a loop-based software music sequencer and DAW for Mac OS and Windows by Ableton. In contrast to many other software sequencers, Live is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool for composing and arranging. It is also used for mixing of tracks by DJs, as it offers a suite of controls for beatmatching, crossfading, and other effects used by turntablists, and was one of the first music applications to automatically beat match songs. It does not support traditional musical notation.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Saturday, October 1, 2011
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