Reading Response 1

The introduction to smart mobs is very interesting. Rheingold reminds me very much of Thomas Freedman in his book "The World is Flat." They share this vision of the future. This foresight. And they are so passionate and intelligent it seems undisputed. Everything they write seems like it will definitely happen or is already in the works. I find few areas of skepticism in their writing.

So SHIBUYA CROSSING seems to be the initial catalyst in Rheingold's writting of this book. The thing that surprises me the most is his consciousness to this as early as the year 2000. I mean I was only a freshmen in high school, but back then I was not conscious of the emerging wave of technology.

So what he thinks is that in that "within the next decade, the major population centers of the planet will be saturated with trillions of microchips" (Rheingold xii). He believes groups of people using these tools will gain new forms of social power. Who ever finds the most effective way of business will profit.

One problem is that with all these new powers, we are guaranteed to lose old freedoms. I personally don't think this is a bad situation though, for the most part new things seem to be better and more efficient. I will hold on to that thought though, until a situation that tests that arises.

Read the post below before you watch this.

I have written a detailed post about this movie we made last semester. Read that before you watch our film, it will give you some background and lineage of certain things.

Work from Previous Class

After spending all this time on my Second Life Presentation has made me remember a movie we created last semester in another technology class. Technology in the Classroom. We were charged with the topic of creating a movie at least 5 minutes long. We sat down and decided to create something comedic since it was our first try. If we did drama it could possibly turn out bad, and nothing is worse then trying to do something serious and it coming out laughable. We were to show it to the entire class so we thought a comedy was reasonable. We took it beyond that though. We decided to do a mockumentry. A mockumentary is pretty much a parody of something in a documentary style. If you notice we have interview sessions. We all had a place in our hearts for Poker, so we decided to do a parody of the World Series of Poker. If you do not know, the World Series of Poker, is the biggest poker event of the year. It is held in Vegas, at Binion's Casino. We put a spin on that title, and since World Series also applies to baseball, we went with the absurd theme of stealing from a random sport, and thus: The Stanley Cup of Poker was born. Initially, we intended it built up the tournament to the extremes and then have every1 realize it was just in our dorm room, but it didnt really work out like that. All in all it was a lot of fun, my first chance dealing with "actors" and some funny stuff came out of it.

Second Life Presentation

So, I have been working on my second life presentation all day and I am very excited about it.

Right now I have about 5 minutes and I hope to get to about 8. It's been a lot of fun because I

have used a lot of different aspects. I am using Jpeg pictures, music, my personal audio

commentary, and video as well. So this is going to be rather entertaining. I do not have my tripod

with me so it is unsteady at times which is annoying, but I'm sure it adds to the raw feel of the

video. It will seem real. I have the rights to the music because the band playing are close

friends of mine and the pictures are from flickr. So far everything is legal. lol. Which normally

does not happen in all my videos. But I am going to get back to this so bye for now.