Downloading free music without committing any crimes...

The digital landscape is changing. It appears evident that the web is and will continue to shape business forever, music is no different. The notion of creating a multimedia piece online seems pretty quick and convenient with the uprise of websites like Youtube, which makes publishing any multimedia content that you create as easy as sending an email to a friend. One of the major problems that the world of digital creativity faces is the issue of music licensing. If you want to use/share someone else's music, you have to take extreme precautions in order to perform this legally. On Thursday someone in class asked about the issue of downloading free music in relation to our discussion about free open source software, and after surfing the web looking for information on downloading music I came across a website called Opsound. Opsound is "a gift economy in action, an experiment in applying the model of free software to music". Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound pool using a copyleft liscence developed by Creative Commons. The listeners are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine. After browsing this website I started thinking about how successful this website could be if more people knew about the opportunities it has to offer. Say more and more artist in the music industry decided to release certain songs from there albums and download them to websites like Opsound, this would prevent people from downloading songs illegally from the web. The incentive for artists to download music to sites that use the free open source software model is that maybe they can agree to put a few songs of their choice on the website, and then place a link to a website where listeners can go if they would like to purchase more music from that particular artist. This method allows for the creators and/or producers of the product (in this case music) as well as the general public benefiting from new product put out on the web. I think this website can really tie into our discussion of the economic and emotional arguments on the topic of free open source software.

I have IAD, and you might too...

After watching the documentary in class about the internet rehab center in china, I decided to look into rehab centers in the U.S. and how they plan to put an end to internet addiction. I found a program called reSTART, which is a 45 day program designed to "take serious suffers of IAD (Internet Addiction Disorder) and bring balance to their lives", joining this program will cost you $14,500 (at first this shocked me, but then I looked into how much other rehab centers cost and this price does seem reasonable). Internet Addiction Disorder refers to the obvious new phenomenon of people who can't resist using the internet or feel that their excessive use of the internet interferes with their daily lives. It is not currently included in the Disgnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but many argue that addictions to the web and to internet based video games do indeed exist. To qualify for admittance to reSTART you are required to display 5 of it's 12 symptoms for IAD, which are as follows:

• Increasing amounts of time spent on computer and internet activities

• Failed attempts to control behavior

• Heightened sense of euphoria while involved in computer and internet activities

• Craving more time on the computer and internet

• Neglecting friends and family

• Feeling restless when not engaged in the activity

• Being dishonest with others

• Computer use interfering with job/school performance

• Feeling guilty, ashamed, anxious, or depressed as a result of behavior

• Changes in sleep patterns

• Physical changes such as weight gain or loss, backaches, headaches, carpal tunnel syndrome

• Withdrawing from other pleasurable activities

I won't tell you which symptoms I display, but according to this, I can self diagnose myself with IAD, and if you answered yes to 5 or more symptoms, you have it to! Now, aside from airing my dirty laundry about my medical conditions, I'd like to discuss the rehab program itself. Say you pay the $14,500, fly to seattle, and come back "healed", you now have another problem on your hands! In this day in age pretty much everything is going to be done online, we've all heard those threats before, and there is probably some truth to them. So, in a world where everyone is turning to the internet what are these newly "healed" people supposed to do, pretend like the internet doesn't exist?? How will they manage going online JUST to check there e-mail, or JUST to pay a bill? The reality right now is that the interet is pretty much unavoidable, at some point or later you will essentially have to go online to connect yourself with the rest of the world. What do you think, is internet rehab a waste of money in a world that exists half on the internet?

Tapscott needs to get a clue...

Since I haven't been to any classes since last Thursday I obviously spent most of my time thinking about Don Tapscott's article The Impending Demise of the University. Something I found especially interesting were Tapscott's points about multi-tasking. I'd like to interrupt this blogspot to let you know that I was thinking about starting my next sentence on multi-tasking when I received a message on the facebook chat application so naturally I had to interrupt my homework to read and respond to it. Now, on to my point about University students being deemed expert multi-taskers...Tapscott says on page three, "They're used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload." Just because I was talking to someone on facebook and writing my weekly blog at the same time doesn't mean that I'm good at multi-tasking...to be honest I wasn't really having an engaging conversation with the person on facebook, they asked me what the homework was for a class we take together, and it obviously did not make my blog any more academically strong, I even interrupted my train of thought and the flow of my blog to tell you about what I was doing. In fact, with as many times as i've stopped doing my blog to talk to my friend sitting next to me or with as many times as I've looked at facebook while writing this, I maybe could have finished my blog twenty minutes ago. Therefore, my multi-tasking was the furthest thing from anything productive or anything that could even be considered a good use of my time. Tapscott is giving students like me credit for having this "ability" of being on facebook while I do my homework, seriously? So is he giving credit to students who sit on there laptops in class and surf the web or shop online (just for the record, I would obviously never do this) while they pretend to take notes on an empty word document they have open on there computer? Tapscott needs to learn more about University students and there behavior before he should write any more articles making accusations about them that are in my opinion, a little absurd.

The Digital Divide and Doritos

A few hours into the blizzard of 2010 my roommate and I decided to go to Giant to stock our room with junk food for the weekend. The supermarket scene resembled a documentary you'd watch about the safari on the Discovery Channel. While it took about 20 minutes to make it down the two glorious snack food isles the check out lines were a journey we could only take on if we opened a bag of chips and sat on the floor. We scanned all the isles to find the line with the shortest amount of people and it happened to be the self check out lanes. Standing in line indulging in a bag of Doritos I noticed how much faster the self-checkout lines were going than the lines with an actual human being checking people out. Spending some time people watching in line, I couldn't help but notice the demographic of ages in the lines. There was not one elderly person in the self-checkout lines but they were the majority of the people in the normal ones. This got me thinking about issues we talked about in class this week on the digital divide, were the elderly people not using the self-checkout lines because they didn't know how to use the technology? It was obvious that these lines were moving significantly faster than the normal lanes, and who finds joy in standing in line at the supermarket? I think this was a great representation of how the digital divide in separating people in all areas of life. With the fairly new "Peapod Delivery" feature of Giant customers can point click on items they want which will be delivered to there door in a matter of days. I'm sure not many senior citizens are even aware that this service is even offered. But consider how much benefit and convenience Peapod could bring to the elderly who have a hard time making it to the grocery store to get there own groceries. While this feature is readily available to anyone with an internet connection, not everyone is technologically savvy enough to navigate themselves through it. So has the digital divide separated us from the a large portion of senior citizens because their lack of experience with new developments in technology?

Final Thoughts

For my final blog post I would like to look at the bigger picture of analyzing new media. I know we have touched on this a little bit in class but never really went further into it. What I think is interesting about talking about new media is the timing in which it is done. It seems as though the articles we have read which are written well after a technology has become developed are the most accurate and we can truly analyze them and how they impact our lives. It's hard to talk about new media most of the time, mostly because it is hard to talk about new things which we do not have a lot of information on. By the time we get around to figuring out whatever the new technology is, its most likely already old and something new has been developed. Therefore technically speaking, we aren't talking about new media anymore. Technology is advancing faster that users can merely purchase or figure out the technology. I think that this undermines a lot of great inventions because we're in such a hurry to find out what new "gadget" or "website" will come out next. Not that my opinion is going to have an affect on how the world of media platforms develop, but blogs have been a huge influence in the past decade! I hope this class is still offered at CUA in a few years and it would be interesting to sit in on it and see what they are talking about now...I feel like without this class I may start to become out of the loop in the world of new media!

Rockin Around the Radio...at the Christmas Party Hop!

With all the hype going on these days about the interent I would like to dedicate this blog to radio. During the holiday season I leave my car radio tuned to 97.1 which plays holiday music non stop through new years (that's right, Christmas music, ALL the time). This radio station has always been a highlight if my holiday season since I was old enough to remember. In between Christmas music listeners call in and share holiday stories and traditions (a huge bonus if you ask me)...last night a woman called the radio station and said that she was making dozens of Christmas cookies with her entire family and they kept the radio tuned to 97.1. I found it interesting that families were using one of the oldest forms of media to bring there family closer together. With the internet these days everyone seems so isolated from each other in a sense, everyone on there own computers surfing the web and checking emails and most people have there own TVs in there bedrooms. Radio brings people together and reminds us of the true meaning of family. With all these new media inventions its weird to think that we use one of the oldest forms to complete the simplest of tasks.

BLACK FRIDAY EXTRAVAGANZA!

I am writing this blog post to make up for a blog post that I missed this semester. I would like to bring up the issue of black Friday, I know everyone is sick of hearing about it on the news and radio, but I would like to share some insight. I saw a story on the news on thanksgiving about a website called Black Friday 2009, its a website dedicated to the best shopping day of the year. Basically, the website that has a list of stores where you can click on a store and view the ads they have out for their black Friday deals. They even have a section dedicated to online specials for people who don't want to bother with the holiday crowds. This website is useful because its basically a one stop website where you can sort of set up a "game plan" for your black Friday shopping. If you didn't catch the 3 million advertisements elsewhere, no need to fret...you can look through the 35 pages of ads for one day of the year, for one store alone! Boy, I sure do love consumerism!