Get it together

today i have an awful headache, the reason for which is not an evening hoedown or counterfeit vodka or even a hard night before an exam, but 6 hours playing an mmorpg called Dofus. One thing separates this little flash-based game from thousands of others - a special panda-like class that can be accessed only after subscribing, ironically. But due to it's simplicity and cuteness, it attracts me so much that i couldn't turn away from the separate 800*600 window for hours, killing thousands of arachnee and chatting with some crazy people ( terrible silly teens mostly ). Thanks God, i haven't become friends with anybody, because i don't even want to think about returning to the game today. Whether or not i was an active chats and forums member for about 2 years doesn' matter any more (and i don't regret anything about that 15years-old girl) - because now i have no interest in taking part in any form of group communication. So that big part of mmorpg pleasure is unobtainable for me. And it's great! I can read and write about it with no passion, still having a big interest in this area.
and the strong headache is a good reason to meet with reception girls in first (to get a magic pill) - 5 blondes sitting in the basement and chewing their hamburgers like wonderful 5 cows on the sacred meadow.

It's now about the month of silence. The reasons are different - my notebook was broken and i even can't write memos, don't thinking about such benefits, as reading rss-feeds with my morning tea and cookie ( can't keep silent near the cookies and cookie monster, he is the best! who cares about cluuues without cookie? me want cookie!). After all that hardware problems had been fixed, i had absolutely clean mind, nothing to say, and absolutely clean bookmarks, nothing to read, so it took some time to restore them. I'm still suffering from randomisation of all my information sources, but at least i can write here. So, i will.
On Monday i went to the little local music festival "Long Arms", which represents avangard, free-jazz, noise and electronic or whatever experimental and usually unknown musicians to the russian public. The festival is extremely interesting itself, but thanx to my friend, who accompanied me in that evening, i have realized some intereting facts about postmodern music and its perception in postmodern. Adam Klipple, wonderful pianist and sampler, said he was a thief. Really, he steals samples from different people giving them no fee as usual, and this first of all reminds me of DJ Shadow and his "First Completely Sampled Album" Endtroducing..... It's all not about money, finally it's not the Freaconomics blog here , but about a new level of music production. Production is a very good word - i can't call it music creating or even music writing in its classical meaning. It's a producion, like an assembly line (sure, we have one creative person instead of 1000 cheap Chineses here, but who cares?) with the only difference that everybody knows the name of Henry Ford and nobody can tell you something about sampling history.
Another feature of modern music, connected much more with its distribution and distribution of all intellectual property at all, is its globalisation and accessebility. It's impossible to find Damon Albarn's vynil "Democrazy" now, especially in Russia, but i can always download it from p2p. With such allocated network of distribution music lost its owner. And sure i'll try to elide regular links to whoever you can imagine (in music it's especially easy and popular, i think), multidimensional humor (i can't forget to write about nD humor in the separate note) and all that stuff, that makes modern music postmodern (feels like postmortem, brr).
But are all these things principally new? Do they transmit any unusual for music messages ? It's very controversial question, even yesterday, when i thought about it i was confident in positive answer, and now i can't tell for sure. Give me some more time to think.

Just in few words. Awfully accidental death of Steve Irwin, well-known ‘Crocodile Hunter’ reflects differently in the web. Two most popular tags at flickr today are crocodilehunter and steveirwin, and irwin is on the 5th place.

I’ve been suffering from topic holocaust all day, thus when I open Firefox and go to the Look At Me page just for lounging, my thoughts about new media run ahead (apropos I’ve tried to find adequate definition of the term new media. Without success. There is something on Wikipedia, but its very arguable, though there does seem to be more truth in the progress of the debate). Is it possible to call a style/fashion a media? I think yes, but not fashion in it’s entirety (as apposed to music or, say, politics). The only thing I can consider true new media is a special new trend which has appeared in the last 8 or 10 years – street fashion. Born in Japan (it was Shoichi Aoki who called it Fruits in 1994 for the first time) it is associated with bright, fascinating and unique outfits that are a random combination of designer and handmade clothes. Ever since the first Fruits magazine appeared in 1997, the trend has become massive not only in Japan, but all over the world. It seems to me that the main source of so wide-spreading of this trend is WWW, due to the relatively young, active and independent auditory, and of course because of its accessibility. Just in 15 minutes I can find several dozens of blogs, that contains photo of street-styled people from San Fran, Oslo, Sao Paolo or Manila, and they all (blogs I mean, but may be people too) are linked with each other. That is the ordinary subculture, you will argue, with its ideology, clothes features and independent media. But not get nicely left by the cunning cause-and-effect relation: it’s strong ideology, that defines punk or teddy style. So that, that type of cloth only transfers a message about its owner’s outlook – the tradition media characteristics, just similar to the radio or telegraph. While the street fashion became a message itself, giving no characteristic of its owner – you may be a punk, or a hippie, or a hip-hop singer, or just a 13-year-old schoolgirl, it doesn’t matter when I see you at the street in unusual and remarkable outfit. McLuhen’s theory in use.

There were too many thoughts about teaching and learning here, so today I want to change the subject and try to make sense of something more artistic (then again, what can be more artistic then teaching?). I was about to write this post yesterday, exactly after chatting with my friend in icq. I'll give a short report of that conversation to make myself clear:

Me: http://seedmagazine.com/news/2006/04/state_of_the_planet.php - such a lovely little thing!
S: oh my god that is just too depressing.
Me: depressing? Why?
S: it’s frightful, don’t you see? It’s hard to find such fact “lovely”.
Me: oooh, you mean the ecology issues and all that stuff? Yeah, sure. But I was talking about its glossy looking, it’s made really well.
S: and what does that have to do with anything?

After overcoming first confusing feeling of being a glamorous blond i began to analyze my impression of mentioned piece. Making allowance to my principally visual sensory modality (see http://www.new-oceans.co.uk/new/learn.htm for some information about sensory modalities or google for NLP Basics) and to my absolutely deafness to ecologic problems, I can only say that it’s still a question of the information's presentartion, not the information itself. If we imagine received information in the flow form, the first its byte for me means beautiful or not. Only the second one provides data about its utility. So that, when it is necessary to mark the importance of the content, not the form, it is the designer’s task to make design as inconspicuous as possible. This is not to say that design must be plain or unkempt, but it’s only a tool, not a final goal. Of course if we don’t talk about designer’s portfolio.

In the virtual area all ergonomics questions resolve themselves into graphic component (I repeat that there are exceptions everywhere, Conclave Obscurum is a good example that). Therefore, a designer’s challenge is simpler and more difficult at once.

It's raining today since early morning, so it's a great chance to sit opposite the notebook screen -- the only source of light in the room -- drinking hot tea with honey and reading blogs and e-zines. I've found a couple of not-so-scientific, but rather curious articles on Times Online, that are in some way connected with my yesterday topic (especially with its last paragraph). Michael Parsons at his When you wish upon a StarTAC mostly talks about mums’ common fear of letting kids use mobile phones because of the possibility of them “frying their brains”. Another pieceby Stewart Mitchell describes some parallel rosy-coloured reality in which happy families all around the world found their heart and home in the WWW, new media and all sorts of connecting technologies. Finally, Katrina Manson's article explains why all above-mentioned gadgets are so cool harmful for children. And this is only a one fleet glance at one web-page.
To put it otherwise we have three generic beliefs on the one simple problem – children and technologies - to encourage, rather than inhibit and prevent. As for me it’s classical scheme of the generation gap, complemented by relevant vocabulary. There are sons, that don’t know any other way, don’t want and definitely wouldn’t ever live without hi-tech tools. And there are fathers that read paper books, played football as a child and often don’t even know what PSP stands for. Luckily, there is always a layer between these opposite poles, a layer that contains mature people (no connection with age) who’ve fully kept the facility of their mind. Their decision is to teach and give a possibility – such a simple way that gives such good result.

It is trite idea, but I should write it and share.

  It's necessary to write something here everyday, so i will ( typed"wii" at first, can't wait till Christmas *sniff ). I was scrolling through http://www.smartmobs.comand saw this post. Quote:

August 16, 2006

• 0 c | 0 t

  by Howard Rheingold

Not touching Berkeley and Howard Rheingold himself (and his painted shoes ), i  just want to point out the instruments of his study - yes, i mean those student blogs, podcasts  and wikis. I don't speak about a new method of teaching, but a new level of it. While teachers can't burrow into the brain of their students interaction is the only way to control not only the process of data perception, but even the attention of the person (if we are not fans of the stick andthe carrot policy, that is). It doesn't matter whether it is a dialogor a game or a blog with comment function, because it's only the new form of the old method. But no doubt the course, that demands active blogging from students  will be more popular than stupid teachers' formula of giving presentations and writting exams (ceteris paribus,and when it doesn't concern lazy students, so i mean an ideal case).This is the influence of the digital information and media on the cognitive ability: starting from kindergarten age a child has to calculate more and more data than his older brother 3-5 years ago.Playing videogames, abstracting to chat in skype,and planning to record a videopodcast at the evening, this young lad demands more sophisticated methods of getting his attention in subject. Sorry to say, the school system in general and all its teachers in particular are too inert. Here in Russia even in the one of the most progressive university it is impossible to think about web 2.0 as a real media between lecturer and his student at least for 2 or 3 more years.

So, i started this journal mainly for my little researches in media and society. Don't really know, what it will be in month, or year, but now it seems to be more a scrapbook of interesting links and my comments, then anything else.

To describe a subject i'd like to start with words perception, recognition, reaction, manipulation in one hand, and virtuality, digital media, computer games, internet mechanisms an so on - in the other hand. I will try to combine and mix these points, using the glue of science or art, haven't understanded yet. The only thing that i know at this moment ( besides that sunny fact, that i don't know anything), that i have a goal and a lot of raw material in my head, books and boundless internet, so the last thing is a magic little effort. I hope this lj will help me.