New Media Manifesto

The arrival of new media and its digital form introduced new possibilities to content creators. As computers evolved and became more and more affordable, people started to be on both ends as the consumer and the creator. From that point, the idea of authorship started to change. 

It was no longer required to create from scratch. Softwares allowed anyone to not only create content more easily but also to take someone else creation and build upon it. Additionally, softwares to make other softwares gained tremendous popularity, creating this loop of infinite creativity. The line between the author and the consumer started to be less and less distinguishable.

Later, the arrival of the Internet and Social Medias also altered this idea of authorship as people started to come together and collectively contribute to each other's creation. A participatory culture was born.

Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1995)

Software to edit and remix content

The particularity of New Media is that it seems like it was never intended to be consumed only. As softwares started to gain popularity in the mid-80's, they always had the option to both view and create content. The application "Notepad" for instance, since it became available in 1985, has always allowed users to not only view text files content but also to create new ones. Similarly, more advanced softwares such as Adobe Photoshop can open almost any digital picture but also provides powerful tools to create new content, often based on someone else creation.

Software to create more software

Steve Job's introduction of the Mobile App Store in 2009 pushed this idea that anyone can become a content creator. 

Apple introduced a series of tools under the name of "iPhone SDK" that would allow anyone to create mobile apps for iPhone. Although similar tools existed long before the iPhone era, Apple made it more accessible. They made it sound as if learning to code and creating content was easy and that anyone can do it.  

The Internet, Social Media, and Participatory Culture

The Internet and the raise of Social Media created an interesting culture where both the consumer and the author can collaborate and together be the creators.

Real Men Real Style's creator Antonio is one example as he started a YouTube Channel to help men to better dress and take care of their personal image. The channel originally offered content based on Antonio's ideas but soon shifted to topics requested by his audience. Soon enough, all of his videos were based on followers' ideas. 

2011 Video

 

2016 

A culture of anyone can by anything started to also gain popularity with business pushing this idea of DIY.

Community Curation Creation

https://jbrodriguezsite.wordpress.com


Since this project required the participation of a community, it was interesting to see its development thought the period it was publicly available. Although the idea of social medias is to make us believe that we can easily reach out to anyone and make connections, it is a different story to invite others to reach out. When I first posted my invitation on Facebook, it took a good hour before I got any response. This was surprising to me considering how quick people have engaged in some of my previous posts. Additionally, with over 1000 friends, I was expecting great participation. But this one was different since it was asking something specific rather than indirectly inviting anyone to share their opinion. It was posted at a prime time when there's usually a great amount of activity on Facebook but still failed to reach out people. At first, it seems that the invitation of sharing a weird dream was perhaps a little too intimidating. After a few hours, more people started to engage but participation was still low.  It is interesting that I had to manually extend invitation to some of my friends to get the conversation going. After some more inputs, more and more people engaged and finally I was able to reach a great level of participation.

I think it is fair to say that communities engaging in new media want it to be simple. People are also more willing to engage if it comes on their own. New Media seems to be a culture of "we only engage when its convenient." We read emails and texts whenever we want and reply also whenever we want. In the end, community still engage but those factors (and many others) definitely affect participation.

Poor Nutrition

https://www.tes.com/lessons/TuuiUGOyBznf5w/

While most social issues are controversial and popular, poor nutrition is one of those subtle ones that we often forget about. And I am not talking about poor nutrition in terms of not having food to eat but rather to not pay attention to our own diet. For this reason, I decided to create a pedagogical list that will first inform its users and then invite them to see by themselves how problematic the issue is. The first two modules addresses what exactly a poor nutrition is and what are the negative consequences of such diet. The decision to use a slideshow for the first module "What is a Healthy Diet" is to provide a medium where the user can learn at its own pace to fully understand the concepts explained.
Additionally, I use simple websites throughout the list and invite the user to ponder and answer some questions. Typically, the questions are open to incite the user to think and realize by himself/herself that caring about our own diet is important. In the third module, I invite the user to take a food disorder test. The goal is to give the user a better idea about how a diet can impact someone's life. After taking the test, the user may or may not find anything problematic with its own diet but the process will certainly make him or her realize that other people do. The fourth module gives an extended experience about the user's own diet. With the help of a mobile application, the user is invited to track his/her diet for a few days and compare the results with what is recommended. The following modules push the user to act and make some modification to its own diet to improve it. The user reports then on some of the changes they have observed throughout their experience.
The whole idea is really to get the user to understand and experience what it means to care about his/her diet. For some, it might feel like its too much trouble. For others, they might realize that it is easier than than thought. Ultimately, the purpose is awareness and let the user decide what he or she wants to do about it.

YouTube Sculpting

          One of the first limitations that I noticed as I approached the "YouTube Sculpting" is that it was remarkably easy to not find what I was looking for. Even though I knew that the final product would be an assemblage of mostly random videos, I had pictured in my mind a lot of the sequences that I was hoping to find. I quickly realized that YouTube's Search engine has its own way of thinking. For instance, I would search "walking" in hope to find a person walking from "Point of View" but instead I would be find tons of Walking Dead clips. In most cases, I ended up finding completely random things but surprisingly many still applied to my theme of "Friendship". One instance is the videos of dancing. I originally had this idea of incorporating the different stages of a friendship but as I was digging upon the term Friendship I found out that activities with friends was a whole new subcategory to explore. From there, pillow fights, water gun fights, and many other videos came from. Although I was limited by what YouTube was offering up, I started to embrace that those random videos were simply giving me more ideas that I could think of and then take a couple of new directions. In the end, I concluded that the only limitation was my original idea. There is some creativity in embracing the virtual limits of YouTube results. 
  Another great thing about finding videos is that some videos would already be compilation of something that I was looking for. Finding smiling faces was particularly easy. For instance, some YouTuber decided to collected a bunch of videos from movies where actresses smile. I could then cut the video and select different of those as if I would have collected them all individually by myself. This not only added originality to my video but saved me a lot of time. One limitation to those findings on the other hand is that not every video was suitable for the final montage. Some of them had terrible quality. Others were so long (over an hour long) where it became complex to download the whole thing and edit it. It feels as if some videos were almost immediately disqualify because of their "digital" properties. Fortunately, YouTube filter options helped narrow my searches by selecting shorter videos. 

Twine Poetry

http://talentswat.com/Twine/Home.html

Originally, "A Message" by Coldplay talks about a man who loves a woman despite all the challenges she is going through in her life. The poem focuses more specifically on the fact that the woman has been struggling with personal experiences and the man wants her to know that she doesn't have to be alone, that he cares about her.
Based on such structure, I decided to create a game where the player would have to make a series of choices (where he or she would feel sort of alone) to finally be told that despite what the choices made, it is okay and he or she doesn't have to be alone in all of this.
To achieve such game, I first decided to alter some parts of the poem to enhance this sentiment of loneliness. The player is given the option then to change certain parts of the poem for something that he or she feels more comfortable with. All text options are either negative or neutral. This is once again to make an emphasis that the player is on its own. As the player gets to the end, the game takes a position of someone that cares for the player. The game rephrases some of the selections the player made and shows them on screen. The game tries to make the player understands that he (the game) understands what he or she player is going through. The games ends just like the original poem by telling the player that he or she just needs to come home so everything is okay.
The game is quite simple with only a few text options. To enhance the experience, I believe that the poem should be longer. The intention is really to have the game understand the player in his solitude, the same way the man cares about the woman.

GIF Cinema

Although stories are usually easier to tell chronologically,  I found out that GIF can do the same without necessarily having to conform to a specific order. This is possible only because of the very core feature of any given GIF: the loop. They don't necessarily have a start or end which allows them to tell stories in the order they want.
          As I was thinking of my story to share, I decided to entirely focus on this principle of loops. First, the story would't necessarily have a particular order. Just like any perfectly looped GIF, it doesn't really matter when it starts because once it comes back it to where it started, it all makes sense. With that in mind, I decided that my story wouldn't require a particular order. Out of all the GIFs that makes the story, any of them could be either the first or last.
          Second, I made sure that each GIF would entirely loop and come back to its original point. The objective being to make the loop feel as if it was inexistent. This is important because it allows the short story within the GIF to be isolated from any other GIF. If the loop is broken with a clear ending, the GIF becomes just one of possibly many parts of a greater story.
         Using cinemagraphs required each GIF to be looped perfectly otherwise things would look odd. For each GIF, I decided to incorporate elements that naturally loop in real life. Those elements would be the ones moving while everything else would remain still.
          As I was putting together each GIF, I realized that cinemagraphs, if they are well done, have the power to transports us into a moment of reflexion. A moment where it feels almost like everything has stopped but not entirely. This was an interesting realization because it supported the point that stories doesn't always have to be told chronologically to be understood. The narrative through a GIF is unique because it is not bound to a particular order.

Here's my story now: Me interacting with technology on any particular given day. 

I Believe

What made me really appreciate this assignment is the fact that the process of finding something that I believe in invited me to rethink what I personally describe as a belief. When we think about it, we use the word believe for so many things and in different contexts. One can believe in God while at the same time believe that his or her favorite sport team will make it to the playoffs this year. While both are beliefs, they are most likely to affect a person in possibly two completely different ways.
          Such analysis lead me to think that a true belief is an idea/principle that has a direct impact on the way I live my life. It is personal and possibly something that I am passionated about. It is the type of thing that could get me involved in an argument, something that I have a strong opinion about.
          The way men dress in general is where my fireside chat idea originated from. I strongly believe that we, men, have a hard time not only dressing well but also not dressing terribly. I still can't decide if it's a sort of curse, if it's in our genes, or if it has something to do with our North American culture but one thing sure is that most men that struggle dressing well aren't even aware of it. My belief is that there is power behind dressing well as a man. I have seen it, I have experienced it, and it makes a lot of sense to me.
          From that point, I started to think next on how to transmit the way I feel about this topic without necessarily imposing it to others. Since a belief is personal, I felt that it was more appropriate to share rather than trying to convince. Following that line of thoughts, I ended up creating a double presentation. Both would be identical except for one of them I would be dressed poorly while the other one I would make sure to wear some of my best clothes. That way, I would let the audience decide and make their own opinion if dressing better really has an impact on how they perceive people. I will let them decide if the way a man dresses directly affects what no only they think of him but what they expect from him.
          As simple as it may sound, this reminded me of what art is really all about. Art never really tries to force you to believe in what it represents. It's simply a creative representation of someone's belief(s). Its purpose is to invite us to ponder and think on our own. It sort of reminds me of a good movie where the end isn't entirely clear. Inception (2010) for instance never really tells us how it ends. We have to make our own decision and decide what we believe in.