Restless Illusion

We decided to compose our chinatown sounds with a hip hop track. Something with a light pace would allow the conversations and chinatown backgrounds to stand out.

Marshall McLuhan was a communications theorist whose works formed a cornerstone of media theory. Understanding Media was one of his seminal works, where he explores the effect of media in society. The first two chapters were a very dense and sometimes confusing read. Perhaps it was due to his personal writing style, or writing styles in the 1960’s, which made his descriptions excessively wordy and his analogies not quite on the point.

His expansive definition of media as an extension of man was very insightful. Any external change we make in the environment can have social impacts. He also probes into the complexity of media by stating that media can contain other media as content. I think the medium is certainly part of the message, influencing the delivery and meaning of the message. I agree that a medium can reorganize our perception system, and thus the way we derive meaning from a message. The difficulty of analyzing this phenomenon is that our perception system of prevailing media is so ingrained into us that we can’t imagine perceiving a new medium in different terms. McLuhan spends many words elaborating on the difficulty of explaining this diagnosis.

McLuhan’s concept of hot and cold media was also somewhat unclear. Perhaps a better terminology would be high definition and low definition media. From reading Scott McCloud, it makes sense that more individual participation is used in perceiving low definition media. It doesn’t make sense to put the many different forms of media in just these two categories, since each each medium has different grades of data definition.

Prior to reading the articles, I didn’t have any knowledge of the marketplace for micro payments. I think this business model is something that has only become viable due to the scalability of the internet. Both Shirky and McCloud make good points and rebuttals as to the workability of this model. Apple’s iTunes has shown that there is a market where micropayments make sense. Any market where different customers desire specific components of a product, like a particular song from an album, would be a good candidate for micropayments. Moreover, iTunes has not limited itself only to micropayments, but also given the option of the total payment for all components of a product like the full album. Having this choice is great for accommodating customers, and is definitely not an overload to them.

It is unfortunate that BitPass didnt’ succeed as a business. Shirky has a very strong point about the mental transaction cost of a product. Time and effort required to click through links, enter forms, analyze and keep track of information can be a real deterrent to buying a product no matter how cheap it is, and should be taken into account along with price. This underscores the importance of strong design and implementation of such a micropayment system.

I believe there will come a time for a thriving micropayments market. Once a strong implementation is in place with good usability, a critical mass of products can be offered in the marketplace. And if there is a market with a good selection of goods at a cheap price, why not participate in it. I would have no problem buying my favorite comic book for 25 cents!

Yingxian and I decided to collect sounds from chinatown. We collected sounds on the street, a grocery store, jewelry store, clothing store and dimsum restaurant. We tried to capture interesting chinese and`english conversation.

We realized that the length of our original story would take too much time, so decided to only shoot one of the twin stories. Our story would follow the character who discovers Hall and Oates.

We shot several scenes, including:

• Washington Square park -The ambient sound was deafening, so we’d have to overlay with another audio track
• Cafe on 1st floor of Tisch - The ambient sound and echo were quite distracting
• Basement of Tisch - The lighting was very artificial looking
• Jonathan’s room

We worked in Final Cut to edit the video.

• Do not leave blank track spaces in the DV disc. It ended up giving us trouble during the log and capture phase.
• Using the shotgun mic is only good at a fairly short distance, and may not overcome loud ambient sound.
• We were ending the scenes too soon. It’s good to leave a few more seconds of space.