Future of Books

)Home work Blog entry#3Watch the video clip: http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-342-1814/life_society/mcluhan/clip2

What is the future of the book in the Global Village?

The future of the book in the Global Village is hard to predict exactly because we do not know how technology is going to advance in the future. I think that the importance of books will depend on the advance in other media forms. Marshall McLuhan said that the book hasn't lost importance necessarily, it has just changed what it is used for. In Renaissance times, the book was the only form of receiving information. As time went on, the television, radio and computer became the main sources of information and the book just drifted to the background in that aspect. Books are used now for entertainment and personal insight into someones feelings on a topic (IE. Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis). It is because there are so many ways that are easier than reading from a book to get the info that you need. In the near future, I know books will still be around and possibly very, very, very far in the future, they will no longer be made, kind of like Cd's, tapes cassettes and MP3s took the place of records. But in the near future, the pattern that the use for books has taken will continue. As new technologies and media improvements are created, books' purpose will change. Once again, it is not that books will have to loose popularity but what is changing is its use. That is my opinion and what I took out of the interview.

Aphorism

What do you think the following aphorism mean:
A)"The medium is the message"
B) "Global Village"

I have heard the term 'global village' before. I remember it being about how borders are almost disappearing in a sense because of technology. Now it doesn't really matter where in the world someone lives because technology has advanced that much. For example no we can contact someone living in Australia, the other side of the world, at the touch of a number. That is all thanks tot he telephone. Emails can be exchanged everywhere and anywhere as long as the Internet is accessible. That is just what i remember. When I looked up global village, the definition was, "the world viewed as a community in which distance and isolation have been dramatically reduced by electronic media (as television and the Internet)." I was pretty close. So once again boundaries are lost and losing touch with people is harder to do. The world is quite informed about the situations that go on in other places because of the media. Technology has truly changed the world.

As for the aphorism,"the medium is hte messge", I really had no clue what that meant. I looked it up and this is what I found. "A statement by Marshall McLuhan, meaning that the form of a message (print, visual, musical, etc.) determines the ways in which that message will be perceived. McLuhan argued that modern electronic communications (including radio, television, films, and computers) would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical consequences, to the point of actually altering the ways in which we experience the world."
(http://www.bartleby.com/59/17/mediumisthem.html) So, how I undertsand this is the worlds views on almost everything has been changed in a drastic way because of the media. The media has changed from 40 years ago. It has even changed in the past 10 years, but the way we view the events around us has also been altered because of the form we get the news in. That is what I take out of this saying or aphorism.

Comtech Movie Review

The mini movie we saw on Friday about racism was very well done. It was about a black teenage boy in Germany getting insulted while on the train buy and elderly woman. It wasn’t only entertaining, it had a message; a message that in the past has been a big problem and still to this day is. This movie was clearly made a while ago, but the meaning hasn’t changed. Racism is unacceptable. There is absolutely no reason for it and this movie makes that very clear. Some said that what the teenage boy on the train did wasn’t justified. I disagree. During the whole ride, he had kept quiet as the woman insulted him, making completely disgusting comments. He just sat there and took what she said. He was reserved and polite until the very last minute. He gave her exactly what she deserved. He had done nothing to deserve what she said but she had done everything to deserve what he did. In my eyes, what he did wasn’t that wrong. He could have done much worse, but he felt that this was enough to get the little bit of revenge he wanted, if you can call it revenge. I call it a warning. A warning to never say what she just said again. It wasn’t only toward black people; it was towards the Turks and Italians as well. I feel this movie was effective about a very serious issue.

My first Flash experience

Positive and negative experience
what old i change
what mark would i give myself

For my most recent flash project, we had to make a web page. We could do it on a hobby, band or a personal page. I chose to do a personal page. The positive experiences I had doing this project were learning a bit better how to actually use flash to its full potential. It was difficult learning how to do the different specific things needed to know to complete the project, but in the end it worked out fine and a web page was produced. I liked to see how professionals make the we sites that I go to everyday. I would see how the page but never really know the work that went behind it and now I do.

One of the only downsides to this project was if you made one little mistake during the process, it wouldn't work. There are many steps to completing one section of a scene (i.e. getting text to continuously move across the page), so if one letter in an action script is wrong, there would be nothing moving across the page. That made it a little difficult to locate where you went wrong. That is really the only the negative aspect to my first flash experience.

If I had more time to work on my flash project, I would probably add a scene for each of my favourite bands. I dedicated a scene to 'Music' and listed my favourite artists. I did do one scene for Taking Back Sunday, my favourite band ever and explained their history, why I like them and included pictures. If I had more time, I would make a scene like that for each of the 5 bands I included. I would also add more movement and interactive aspects to the pages. I have on figure that if you click it will move and make it look like its dancing, but if I had more time I would have put more of that type of thing.

If I were to grade myself on this project I guess I would give myself about an 80%. I think that is a fair grade because I included all of the components that were asked for, and I think it was fairly creative. I am not great at the computer and don't really know how to do very much, but I did the most I could in the situation. I could have had more movements and actions but given the time frame and so on, I think i did pretty well. That is why I think that 80% would be an appropriate mark.