Author’s Statement
Well, well, well. Here we are at the end of the year and the final project! Overall, I am extremely happy with my piece; suprisingly, filming it was the easy part! Of course when you hand the camera over to someone else sometimes your ideas get a little “elaborated on” or “misinterpreted” a bit by whoever is filming or acting in the scene. I was just happy that any of my friends would take time out of their finals week to help, so sometimes you just have to let go of control and let the collaboration begin. I think this idea of collaboration and community is an interesting way to begin talking about my video. I think the first segment of the video where I juxtapose or compare the “old days” with the (somewhat) counterpart to that tradition is really important in showing how the idea of community has changed. Most of the “new” things are about individuals (not to say that some of these things aren’t done with more people). I just feel that while these mobile applications have the ability to “bring us closer together” are they really? I think this relates to ideas Dannah Boyd is writing and talking about- the discrepancy between your media life and real life. But I hope that the mockness, the un-seriuos element of it conveyed that while (to me at least) it is a little silly that people play words with friends because it’s cool, although a majority of my friends have never played scrabble, there is something delightfully engaging and perhaps useful about not just words with friends, but applications in general. I don’t how many times I have stolen my friends iPhone to play games. I would love to have an iPhone and if I did I would have words with friends and every other cool application known to man, because that is what we do. It isn’t a bad thing and maybe it isn’t a great thing. I just wanted to draw attention to the change in culture and the way we interact with each other and the way we interact with media.
I think Dannah Boyd was my favorite author and critic we engaged with this semester and the transcript from her talk, “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media” brings to light, in a bit off an off-handed way some ideas that apply to the way we consume these applications. She discuss the idea of living within streams of information and streams of the internet. I think in some ways what the accessability and convinince of the iPhone does is create “tools that allow them [us] to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed.” Indeed we are not overwhelmed because in large part what these apps do is make us feel underwhelmed.
Also, I really loved Evgeny Morozov’s “Think Again” article, because it looked at the reality of the internet. People were saying the same sorts of things when the iPhone (and even more recently the horribly named iPad) came out- it is going to revolutionize everything about how we use cell phones and the internet. A lot of the issues or myths he debunks can apply (since the iPhone is itself, an internet browser) to how we realistically use the iPhone. I wanted to convey in my video some of those same misnomers. It could “boost political participation” or “overthrow dictators” or even bring us closer together by sitting in the same room with someone and instead of talking to them playing words with friends against them… but in large it doesn’t.
