MC Digital Media

internet

2005-11-12T19:02:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned many times before, war is a major catalyst for technological innovations. It seems that the fear of total annihilation causes people to work together, ironically, to innovate and adopt more efficient ways to communicate. In regards to the emergence of the internet during the cold war peek of the 1960’s, military and governments across the globe rushed towards networking their command centers, bases and missile silos, through combining and improving upon “old” technology such as phone and computers. I like to refer to this as the networking race, mirroring the arms race; the idea was not, who would hit the “button” first, but who would get the message to do so first. Once the cold war was over and people could sleep better at night, no longer worried about “Christmas at Ground Zero” (Weird Al Yankovic), commerce became the supervening social necessity of the internet.
As with everything profitable, government orgini8zatoons had a hand in things. In the case of the early (privatized) internet, governments wanted shares of profits generated by on-line commerce applications. Regulations were imposed, as usual, to siphon money out of the new media. Profits to fuel new conflicts and beef up defenses in reply to said conflict, maybe?
It is interesting to see, however, now in such a short period of time, the various international military networks were finally combined. Given the endless conflicts and differing governmental regulations and points of view, it is amazing to see how quickly a common language for a common media network was established.

ecologizing mobile media

2005-10-30T22:38:00.000-08:00

Obviously every new technology has its advantages and disadvantages. Look at the automobile for example, it made the world a smaller place, people could explore beyond their immediate back yard, however it coasts money and was yet another means to kill somebody. I am not going to list advantages and disadvantages of the mobile phone here, it will take too much space and I don’t want to write that much (nor do you want to read it all). Everybody has his or her own list in mind and I believe every point on said list to be valid to the individual. I would however like to point out the learning curve. Any new technology when it emerges, takes some time to master, if the consumer desires it. Some are faster than others in picking it up. Eventually any technology becomes a stranded and the majority of the population will be aware of it and its benefits and drawbacks. We all (the majority of us) grew up with a phone around (at least in western society) seeing one today seems as natural to us as the blue sky (for us Seattleites, that would be those 3 weeks in July!). My theory on new technology (given the closed economy of those who have the means of obtaining it): the first generation innovates it (these are the creators and initial users), the second generation adapts it (these establish the beneficial uses for the new technology) and the third generation takes it for granted!

insourcing

2005-10-30T22:37:00.000-08:00

Like Friedman, I always thought of UPS as merely an efficient player in the shipping industry; how wrong I was. In a way UPS has a similar impact as Wal-Mart on the global economy, but their approach seems far less forceful. UPS focused on the service aspect of the supply chaining, Friedman refers to this as “synchronized commerce solutions”.
UPS already had the freight forwarding down to a tee, well established since 1902 and trusted globally to solve any and everybody’s shipping needs. Just in the recent decade has UPS taken its expertise in freight forwarding to another level: “in sourcing”, Friedman calls it. UPS has taken the role of the worldwide efficiency coach; teaching struggling small businesses how to thing big and with the involvement of UPS, achieve this exact goal on a global level. The freight forwarding company has expanded its efficient business model in to numerous companies, across a diverse variety of markets, by physically infusing itself into these businesses. Friedman uses the example of Toshiba. A customer buys a laptop from Toshiba online and receives it via UPS at their home. If the laptop breaks, UPS picks it up, but instead of sending it back to Toshiba for repairs under warrantee, UPS handles the repairs internally by Toshiba certified UPS employees. How efficient is this? Toshiba doesn’t have to worry about shipping costs and repairs, thus focusing more of its resources on technical innovations; and the customer can have their laptop returned faster, since the repairs are made locally. UPS can expand into the technical market, creating move jobs, and revenue for itself. Everybody wins! Friedman states that UPS “helps out” countless businesses in this manner, “…the small business can act big…the big business can act small”.
The direct involvement of UPS allows a small business to have a global supply chain, thus leveling the competition playing field and in turn the large multinational companies to have small local offices in every neighborhood, thus acting on a very personal level.
There is one issue however, and Friedman addresses this, that in order for companies to allow an outsider like UPS into their infrastructure requires trust on behalf of the company. Businesses are giving part of their company to the care of UPS; so they can focus their energy on innovations and improvements in other sectors while UPS handles the rest, however if the business can’t trust UPS this relationship could never work. In this modern world with the fierce competition that fuels commerce, trust is hard to come by. Fortunately, UPS has established itself as a more than reliable freight forwarding industry for almost 100 years.

supply-chaining

2005-10-30T21:51:00.000-08:00

I’m 31 years old and I can’t say that I have set foot into a Wal-Mart more than once. A unit of the Borg spawned in Mill Creek, WA, just a few blocks from my office. Some of the game programmers at work persuaded me to join them on lunch break to check out an arcade game, “Turkey Hunter”, located between the endless row of cashiers and the sliding glass doors to the outside world. I found it rather impressive that they never ran out of something. Whatever was offered to the consumer was always available; the stores had a bottomless stock. As far as the customer is concerned, Wal-Mart has perfected supply-chaining to near perfect efficiency.
Friedman states that Wal-Mart has not done anything new, as far as a market niche was concerned. They did not invent the wholesale priced retail industry. In the days before Wal-Mart, wholesale giants like Sears and K-mart conducted business very efficiently, selling quality goods at fair prices, resulting in many years of growing success and millions of satisfied customers. Wholesale-priced retail was well established and running effortlessly; “if it works, leave it alone!” Wal-Mart, however, knew that they could do better.
Going up against these established giants proved to become a challenge. The problem: redirect customer loyalty away from Sears and K-Mart and towards the little known Wal-Mart. How? Undercut the competition in price, without neglecting quality. Sound simple, but how do you do it without going broke in the first couple of years. The solution: become the wholesale distributor yourself by directly contacting the manufacturers of the products that want to sell. In order for this to work, Wal-Mart had to become aware of every aspect of its infrastructure, including customer preferences and supplier efficiencies. At this point Wal-Mart revolutionized wholesale retail by saying “if it works, make it better!” In order to compete with Sears, K-Mart and the likes, and finally surpass them, Wal-Mart had to embrace the newest developments in communication technology, and adapt these to most efficiently suit their needs. Not being satisfied with, “if it works, leave it alone”; Wal-Mart became the national and global super-power it now is. Rapid expansion and seeking out the newest developments in technology allows for the creation of many new jobs and training of future employees. In turn this dogma also pushes Wal-Mart’s suppliers to constantly revise their infrastructure to cater to Wal-Mart’s demands.
Howard Rheingold, in “Ecologizing Mobile Media”, says to every advantage there is a disadvantage, and with all the merits Wal-Mart has been awarded, there is an equally imposing darker side. On a global scale, the magnitude and influence of Wal-Mart has a very tight (and short) leash on its suppliers. Manufacturers are urged to adapt to Wal-Mart’s scrutinizing quality control and meet the customer’s needs by volume if they want to stay in business. This directly forces certain of the smaller manufacturers to drastically change their infrastructure and communication technology to stay alive. A further negative point is; Wal-Mart is so desperate on cutting costs and increasing efficiency, that the employees often are neglected. Wal-mart has faced countless disputes regarding healthcare benefits, wage cuts, extended hours and a basically diminishing employee welfare. There is a fine line between optimal efficiency and employee welfare. It seems that in the race for success, Mart-mart has lost track of this line.

Work Flow Software

2005-10-30T20:21:00.000-08:00

I can’t remember a time when computers could not talk to one another, I know I was around then, but it is now something I consider a given. Competition can be a wonderful thing but sometimes it does more hard than good. In the case of networking, a common standard had to be established; a compromise had to be made. As far as the internet was concerned, a common global language had to be established for it to be of any use to anyone. Friedman uses his fire hose and hydrant linkage as an analogy to describe the dilemma. The move towards global interconnectivity was, strictly speaking, a loud and clear cry from commerce; the consumer spoke and the manufacturer listened! Who owned or created the product was of no concern to the customer, as long as it worked. Here, Friedman mentions eBay.com and PayPal.com, 2 well-established internet companies. Both have a loyal customer base. However, customers who used eBay wanted to be assured that their transactions came with a guarantee; they wanted a trustworthy company like PayPal to handle their transactions. A standard had to be created; a compromise had to be made. In short, to increase business and customer volume, eBay bought up PayPal, and absorbed it; problem solved. Looking at this example and others mentioned, we can speculate that mergers will happen and conglomerated will form. Competition with Wal-Mart perhaps…a clash of the titans!

11/9/89

2005-10-30T20:20:00.000-08:00

The section reminds me of the 1945 article by Dr. Bush “As We May Think”. Wartime innovations and inventions can be developed into powerful communications tools of a peacetime economy. After the German, Italian and Japanese threat was diffused in 1945, such inventions as the artillery-targeting computer and encryption decoder, could be applied to facilitate commerce and private lives of a post war society. The end of the Cold War in 1989 and final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 can be viewed in the same way; history does tend to repeat itself. The free market economies efforts in creating faster, more reliable and efficient communications networks among global missile bases during the nuclear arms race can now be tweaked to meet the growing needs of ever expanding commerce. The world no longer has to worry about blowing itself up. The Soviet Union has disbanded and the Cold War is over. The military innovations, in this case the internet and graphic user interface, have caught the attention of capitalism. Funding has shifted from military to private sector, as the awareness of a very efficient communication tool has infiltrated global commerce. With the “red threat” gone, the physical territory for capitalist advances has nearly doubled. In order for the free market economy to expand into this new territory, and competition being what it is, a fast and efficient communication system has to be in place. Commerce turned towards the exciting and rapidly worked on improving it to facilitate their needs; making money. Taking the events that followed 11/9 into mind, I believe we will soon be witness to a wave of changes in communications, advantageous to commerce, bourn out of the paranoia of the horrible events of 9/11.

as we may think

2005-10-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

Ideas and theories are limited by the endless imagination of the human mind. To physically manifest these thoughts the inventor or scientist is limited by the latest technological innovations all ready existence. Dr. Vannevar Bush used a perfect analogy describing this exact dilemma. If for what ever reason a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt was handed the blue prints to an automobile, he would not be able to create a single working one. The knowledge of metallurgy, physics and current technology (ancient Egyptian tool kit) were not advanced enough to create the thousands of precisely tuned interactive components that make up an automobile.
He is clearly aware of the limitations of his time, but his crystal ball speculations make due rather well, I must add, with what was available to him. Dr. Bush places much emphasis on miniaturization, especially when talking about the modern camera and sound recording and playback equipment.
He also discusses in great depth the modern file system, regarding file storage, in the form of a punch card run machine called a memex. The memex was the crystal ball concept for a “mechanized private file and library” storage system. And finally last but not least, there is the magnetic strip charge card, you know that small plastic thing with the “Visa” logo. Dr. Bush describes the cards to be miniature and transaction records “on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet”. Definitely a rather primitive and crude version of a device, today, we wouldn’t leave home without. The ideas were here but the current technology was lacking.
I have two points that I want to bring up regarding his limitations. Everything Dr. Bush describes incorporates metal gears and metal based photography film. Plastic, a nifty little German invention, was available to scientists in the United States at the time. Granted at the time too, plastic was still taxing and expensive to manufacture. However, as innovative as Dr. Bush’s ideas may sound, he did not once make use of this extremely versatile and revolutionary compound. His mind (regarding manufacture) remains grounded in his times of metal and film.
The second point that I would like to address is that, even though the television and telephone already existed, Dr. Bush failed to mention any form of networking among his memex machines, besides the millennia old face-to-face. Dr. Bush described in detail the capabilities of the desk computer file storage library, or memex, even as to incorporate a rudimental page scrolling system. What if a machine of such capabilities where incorporated with the telephone or facsimile machine…the Internet of the 1940’s?
locate at http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbu

Technologies of the 3rd mediamorphosis

2005-10-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

From gears to wires to fiber optics and microwaves. Commerce drives the world but what drives commerce? Communication.
As industrialization began to pick up and expand exponentially during the 1800’s, a simple horse and buggy were no longer satisfactory to relay communication in a vast world of ever expanding commerce. The railroad became an intercity network and through the speed of the steam engine, good, documents and services could be relayed in a fraction of the time it used to take. Not only did the tram offer speed but also the possibility of commerce expansion beyond the boundaries of a town and physical imitations of a horse. However, commerce could only move at the speed of the communication technology available at the time.
The invention of the telegraph and speaking telephone, using electricity as a communications facilitator, and the network of railroad tracks as a template to expand a vast web of telegraph cables. Soon to follow electricity was the use of airwaves to send messages even faster. We are starting to see a pattern emerge: communication improves at the rate of human needs. Like the slogan of the advertising world today:
Do we want it? YES!
When do we want it? NOW!
It expresses the needs of human kind.
Having harnessed electricity, communication has become instant. News, messages and services can now be relayed at the same moment at which they occur, are created, and are needed. The Internet clearly has turned communication into an instant gratification to the user. Now people can spend more time enhancing commerce, no longer having to waste time waiting for information; everybody knows how little time we have in a day! Computing power makes communication instantaneous presenting us one less thing to concern ourselves with. However, have we created yet another dependability for ourselves, yet another crutch? The Internet has done away with time lag in communications; whatever information we need to gratify ourselves with is now only a key press away. A century ago light was seen in a similar fashion: only the flick of a switch away from darkness.

Informing Ourselves To Death

2005-10-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

Neil Postman seems to view the information revolution to have a somewhat less desirable influence on society as a whole. The quote by Goethe used by the author, “One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and if possible, speak a few words” encourages individuality of the human being, Neil Postman sees computer technology and internet to do quite the opposite, creating clones, drones and techies. There are many ways this exact quote can be applied to today’s standards to feed individuality and diversity on a much larger scale. Thanks to technology anyone with access to the web can listen to an mp3, read an ebook, see a picture on gettyimages.com, and “speak” some words on a blog of whatever content they desire. As an artist I still use the trusty pen and paper, however I manipulate and color my images to the most part, digitally. Without the reaches of the internet, my images could not bring joy and quandary to nearly as many people as I believed possible.

The Capture of Sound

2005-10-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

This chapter further supports that the entertainment industry has a dominant voice in technical innovations. I once heard somewhere that innovations in communication technology are predominantly fueled by the needs of the military and the entertainment industry. Working in video games, I see my company jump on the newest technical innovations, for research or direct implementation, to churn out a profit. All technological innovations and inventions embody the intended usages of their creators. However, I believe it is society and, more important, industry and commerce that really bring out the innovation’s true applications.

Before the Speaking Telephone

2005-10-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

Upon reflection, “Before the Speaking Telephone” reminds me of my days as a biologist. I recall the patent feuds amongst various pharmaceutical companies over developing cures for the AIDS virus (or even a “pill cocktail” to merely suppress it). The issue is the same; each party patents their finding or invention, making it legally impossible for the “competition” to use an existing process or technology to further their research or innovative device. I agree that the inventor should be credited by all means, but patents, to a degree create obstacles interfering with progress. Without said patents, the road to a close-to-perfectly functioning innovation would be so much smoother (not tot mention that the innovation could mature in a fraction of the time). Yet again we must factor in the aspect of greed, for fame and fortune, such is human nature!

Media Technology and Society

2005-10-10T03:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been a history buff….as I am writing this the History Channel is keeping me company in the background. I find it interesting that it takes so many minds to create something that, today, seems so simple. Many of the inventions and innovations, no matter how complex, come about to facilitate our lives or society as a whole, like Thomas Edison once said: “Find a need and fill it!”. In comparison to the telegraph, the video games industry had only a very short-lived unrestricted age, since it conception during the pinball days. I find it very interesting how fast the government set up restrictions and ratings, although given some games out there I’m surprised they didn’t get on the ball earlier.

How the internet killed the phone business

2005-10-10T02:05:00.000-07:00

I haven’t had a landline since the last century, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to go back to one. However, I still find myself bound to the incumbent entities mentioned in this article, either through my cellular phone or broadband provider. I find it very exciting to see the everyday phone-jack find its way on display at the Smithsonian, filed under technology wonders of the past. Since the Internet already stretches to every nook and cranny, such innovators as Skype can drastically affect the way online games are played. An already rapidly growing community of online gamers now has the possibility to communicate cheaply or for free when and wherever they choose to log on. Concerning my research topic, easier communication could lead to a higher level of interactivity for more people, thus potentially allowing for a more diverse gaming community.As far as the incumbents go, I always believe that trying to suppress a new technology with such impact, would result in an unnecessary waste of time and especially money. It would be profitable (for the incumbent entity) to side with the new technology, and as the author suggests, focus efforts on providing services and devices to support the “new-comer”. This makes sense, as the customer base will always need some sort of device or support to use the new technology to its greatest potential.

Social Aspects of New Media Technologies

2005-10-10T01:41:00.000-07:00

I work in the hand-held sector of the video games industry, far from the “Big 3” (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), however in no way detached! Many of the devices we develop games for are viewed as extensions (or better yet, add-ons) to existing, widespread technology. As the television creators and service providers gear up towards popularizing HDTV, we are busy developing games for the innovative “Plug-it-in-and-Play” video games system. Simply put, this is a controller, with a built-in games chip that uses your existing TV set as the games console; going along with the motto: almost every household already has a TV).
This brings me to the topic of innovations; especially when observing the target audience of the games industry, innovations in hardware and game design are key. In regards to my research topic, which is the following:
“How can the video games industry interest more females (age 15 to 35) to expand its existing video gamer target audience?”
innovations on either end are essential to meet the needs and, in return, gratifications, of the targeted (female) user.
Looking at game hardware (consoles), Nintendo stands out as one of the innovators to listen to what the gamers want, (first to introduce the D-pad, and first to publish a 3D platformer, featuring Mario, off course). Today, the hardware push amongst the “Big 3” has become an amalgamation, to say the least. All feature online access, DVD playback, and HDTV supporting one way or another. We must now look at what all this can do to enhance the games themselves and in turn, entice the target audience.As stated in the article (pgs 465-466), cable TV is so successful, because it has a little something for everyone. Video games, especially online, will likely follow this model (in my case, hopefully at a much faster pace). Today we still see the gun being used as much too easy of a profit-driven plot device. Contents diversification is still lagging somewhat, as a large part of the target audience remains “untapped”.

For starters....

2005-10-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

Here it is...
"fishytom" is not odor related in any sense.....I use it more as a reference to my identity as a freelance artist (when time permits)...i'll explain later.