A Few of My Favorite (Digital) Things

As a little Christmas present - I offer a few of my favorite digital things for 2013. I chose these things because they represent an interesting approach to digital literacies and composing for the brave new digital world in which we live. Or maybe just because I thought they were cool. Anyway - enjoy!

• The best new interactive web thingy is Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" multi-channel music video. Oh, yeah they did that - and it's pretty cool. It's the coolest provocation to digital creativity since Arcade Fire's interactive "Wilderness Downtown," (which I still use in my intro to Digital Literacies class.)
• My favorite (though sometimes frustrating) socially-connected app is WAZE. You probably heard about it this year when Google bought the app from its developer for about a billion dollars. It's like Google Maps meets Twitter - a free navigation app that allows users (er, uh, their passengers,) to share info with other travelers such as traffic jams, accidents, weather, and, ahem - location of police. (Admittedly, I started using this last year I think.)
• For me, and I suspect millions of others, TripAdvisor has stolen time and attention from my other travel and dining apps like Yelp and UrbanSpoon. It's desktop website and smartphone apps work well together to provide friendly, useful and comprehensive collection of user-reviews on dining spots, hotels, attractions, etc.
• Did you know you can use video backgrounds for PowerPoint? I just started using this really cool feature this year. Formerly, you'd have to shell out big bucks to get this effect - or use hinky 3rd-party apps that never failed to, uh... fail.
• And, though it is hardware, I just gotta say - I love the Jambox by Jawbone. I use it around the house for the worlds most portable best music, but its easy-synching with my smartphone and laptop means I can have awesome sound for any presentation, regardless of the available equipment at the venue.

What will 2014 bring? I don't know - but I figure that, whatever it is, it will be delivered by my Amazon Prime drone.

Tim Berners-Lee on the Web Today

Tim Berners-Lee’s "Manifesto on the State of the Web" begins with this: "The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer."

OK, so I stole the title "Manifesto" from other reviewers. The piece at issue here is actually an article titled "Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality," and ran in the recent issue of Scientific American.

But "Manifesto" sounds so much more dramatic, yes? And the issues raised in the article have very dramatic implications - though they are treated in a very measured and logical way by Berners-Lee. I find one of the most intriguing discussions is that of the balance of control and freedom. Simplistic, one-sided arguments are much more likely to generate passionate responses. But they are also much more likely to generate naive, short-sighted and generally useless responses. And, according to Berners-Lee, the issues are too important for such responses:

"The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending..."

You can find the article here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web&page=5 - Enjoy!

The Web is (always already) Changing (again)

The NY Times recently published an article entitled,
"Rise of Web Video, Beyond 2-Minute Clips" you should check it out here.

The "web" as new media is in a constant (non)state of dynamistic flux.

To say, "this is how the web works," or "thi sis how communication takes place online," is a guarantee of obsolescence.

Here's a notably quote from the article: “A few years ago, three minutes ‘watching’ your computer felt like a novelty; now, it’s as familiar as your television set.”

Perhaps more than old media, new media as compositional space is chimeric and chameleonesque - never allowing haunches ot be rested upon!