The remix I've chosen is not one that has any penetration into pop culture whatsoever. In a pretty popular and influential video game from 1998 that has probably garnered more top spots on "best video game ever" lists than any other, there's a little musical ditty based off of a little three-note musical theme called "Song of Storms." In the game, the player has the option of using it to cause the weather to change. It's identifiable as one of the playable songs, but its penetration into any culture, be it video gaming, music, remix, or otherwise is pretty minimal. The song is one of the uncountable themes originally composed and arranged by the prolific game-musician Koji Kondo. Though I've been away from the gaming culture for a very long time, the legacy of that man's music still resonates strongly with me today.
This remix is more of a sentimental, mindless jam session by a dude with a screen name than it is an actual remix, but hey the definition of remix is loosely defined anyway and doesn't really matter for the scope of this assignment. It's got a simple chord progression played on acoustic guitar to open, and continuously backing it throughout. The main theme recognized as the "Song of Storms" is then introduced, played on an additional guitar. He repeats the theme until no longer necessary, then throws on an electric guitar overlay for variety. Then he continues to break down with a long, multi-part solo that goes in a completely different direction.
What I like about this remix is that it still feels very loyal to the Song of Storms. An unfortunate reality of the original material is that it's roughly eight bars of music, and it's really hard to make a fully realized song out of only eight bars of music. He repeats as necessary, because the body of work it comes from is by its very nature repetitive. But you can only repeat an eight-bar theme a couple of times in a musical work. He lengthens it by adding a long instrumental session in the same key, pretty artificial and obviously unrelated to the original work but it sounds good and adds character. I love that. Anyway, before I get too deep into discussing musical merits of song remixing, I'll just go straight into lessig.
This ties into the notions of RW culture Lessig discusses. In his section RW, Revived he mentions how the internet and other technologies are changing our culture's access to tools that allow us to remix media. He uses the example of throwing Beatles' works over Cronkite broadcasts and distributing the result to tens of thousands. That would be difficult before the internet and other technologies allowed us to do such things on an amateur level with almost no budget. I feel like SAiNT 420's remix of Song of Storms is a great example of this as well. Using digital recording technology that's pretty available, he can record himself play some acoustic guitar, and using an established online community (OCRemix), he can distribute it to anyone in the world that wants to hear it.
Lessig discusses many things in RW, Revived and a lot of them are relevant to the presence of this remix. The idea that remix promotes community and education is true of SoS. OCRemix, the website, project, and internet community dedicated to the remixing of video game music, is the vessel that SAiNT420 used to project this remix. It is the very epitome of a strong, benevolent community. Further, the OCRemix project has made me, and I'm sure thousands before and after me, a lot more informed as to the ways of musical theory, transcription, editing, producing, creating. That's not to mention the whole body of knowledge that is digital information sharing, copyright, file management, computer programs, compatibility, etc. As well as the "goods" of remix that Lessig describes, SoS and OCRemix represent the idea of alternative media taking precedence in popular thought. Video games and the internet represent huge amounts of RO consumption, and people playing video games then actively deciding to research gaming communities on the internet is representative of the beautiful romanticized notions of RW that Lessig lauds.
Conclusion: OCRemix is a project that could only be born of a culture that embraces the RW creativity Lessig describes, and SAiNT420's remix "SoS" is an example of a remix that shows people's active interest in RW culture.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Blog #9: Collateral Damage
Lessig's key argument in the introduction as I see it is that we are far too hostile with our approach to copyright infringement, with the rhetoric of "war" we invoke against piracy. He claims that copyright law is outdated and that our approach to certain behaviors is unreasonable, unfair, and useless.
Lessig describes the RW culture as one of divergence, one where all parties have agency and active creation of content is done by all. RO culture is one of complacency with professional creation. Individuals rarely create and a select few are chosen by popular culture to make content. It's important to Lessig because he feels that the current copyright laws suppress and even criminalize most acts of creation by amateurs, and vastly promote RO culture. He shares the romanticized view that RW is superior and ideal.
He brings Sousa into his argument because he feels that Sousa's promotion of "amateur" creativity and limiting the reach of copyright were very useful and can have profound implications in today's landscape of creation. Lessig feels that the copyright laws no longer apply to today, because a new generation of "infernal machines" promotes a RW culture, and copyright restricts it.
Lessig describes the RW culture as one of divergence, one where all parties have agency and active creation of content is done by all. RO culture is one of complacency with professional creation. Individuals rarely create and a select few are chosen by popular culture to make content. It's important to Lessig because he feels that the current copyright laws suppress and even criminalize most acts of creation by amateurs, and vastly promote RO culture. He shares the romanticized view that RW is superior and ideal.
He brings Sousa into his argument because he feels that Sousa's promotion of "amateur" creativity and limiting the reach of copyright were very useful and can have profound implications in today's landscape of creation. Lessig feels that the copyright laws no longer apply to today, because a new generation of "infernal machines" promotes a RW culture, and copyright restricts it.
Blog #8: something or other about Freud and rhythm and disc jockeys
I'm going to abandon all pretense here and just address this prompt in a straightforward way:
In the Rhythmic Cinema section, quotes I enjoy:
"[Surrealists] found that freedom in the abandonment of the roles that they, like everyone else around them, were forced to play" (80).
I've grown to love almost anything that's counterculture, and what better way to be counterculture than to live life devoted to going against the grain of your standard packaged capitalist societal notions like these surrealists do? Live life without boundaries.
Rhythmic Space
"We live in a world so utterly infused with digitality that it makes even the slightest action ripple across the collection of data bases we call the web" (89).
I wholeheartedly agree with this quote because the web is incredibly connected. There's so many connections online, the hyperlink structure is so complex that anyone can see something online. It's kind of haunting to know how international our presence is.
Errata Erratum
"all in all, the creative act is not performed, by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act" (97).
This quote speaks volumes to me because I love music and find such to be incredibly true. A song's meaning is most certainly contingent on the user's interpretation. I've had so many discussions with other musicophiles (?) that have interpreted songs I like in so many bizarre ways that I can't see them as self-contained works any more. They are incomplete until their audience has been reached.
The Future Is Here
[referring to live music versus recordings]
"The two are mutually conditioning, and this cycle will only intensify throughout the twenty-first century" (101).
This section is an afterthought where he breaks down the idea of live music and non-live music, an interesting discussion that's always been present in the music industry. Live music is offered as a more authentic and wholesome music experience, but that does present problems to DJs.
The Prostitute
"I don't know of any artist who really thinks everything is locked down" (109).
This has multiple meaning to me. First, there can be some contention as to whether or not a DJ is an artist in the typical musicianship sense of the term. Secondly, he refers to the idea of content and music being locked down and static. He's both assuming the validity of DJing as artistry and offering a novel idea to the concept of music ownership and fair use.
The song I've chosen is Chiddy Bang's All Things Go, which samples Sufjan Stevens' Chicago.
I wouldn't even necessarily call this a sample. It seems to me a sample is a direct rip of a piece of a track for use in a separate song. This uses the same melodic structure and progression, as well as a rip of the chorus' lyrics, but not the song directly. I guess what is and what isn't a sample is a little loose in definition anyway. The interesting thing about this sample is that it takes a beautiful ballad from the prolific alt/indie-folk god Sufjan Stevens and completely re-tools it as a sentimental hip-hop tune, accessing different sensibilities and appeals throughout. It breathed new life into a song I love, and gave me a new window of vision into the hip-hop culture that I know so little about.
This has implications with what Miller's talking about a lot. A huge amount of his literature refers to convergence culture, and the digitality of songs making access greater. The digitality of music enabled this huge genre crossover and the re-appropriation of an indie classic into the world of hip-hop.
In the Rhythmic Cinema section, quotes I enjoy:
"[Surrealists] found that freedom in the abandonment of the roles that they, like everyone else around them, were forced to play" (80).
I've grown to love almost anything that's counterculture, and what better way to be counterculture than to live life devoted to going against the grain of your standard packaged capitalist societal notions like these surrealists do? Live life without boundaries.
Rhythmic Space
"We live in a world so utterly infused with digitality that it makes even the slightest action ripple across the collection of data bases we call the web" (89).
I wholeheartedly agree with this quote because the web is incredibly connected. There's so many connections online, the hyperlink structure is so complex that anyone can see something online. It's kind of haunting to know how international our presence is.
Errata Erratum
"all in all, the creative act is not performed, by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act" (97).
This quote speaks volumes to me because I love music and find such to be incredibly true. A song's meaning is most certainly contingent on the user's interpretation. I've had so many discussions with other musicophiles (?) that have interpreted songs I like in so many bizarre ways that I can't see them as self-contained works any more. They are incomplete until their audience has been reached.
The Future Is Here
[referring to live music versus recordings]
"The two are mutually conditioning, and this cycle will only intensify throughout the twenty-first century" (101).
This section is an afterthought where he breaks down the idea of live music and non-live music, an interesting discussion that's always been present in the music industry. Live music is offered as a more authentic and wholesome music experience, but that does present problems to DJs.
The Prostitute
"I don't know of any artist who really thinks everything is locked down" (109).
This has multiple meaning to me. First, there can be some contention as to whether or not a DJ is an artist in the typical musicianship sense of the term. Secondly, he refers to the idea of content and music being locked down and static. He's both assuming the validity of DJing as artistry and offering a novel idea to the concept of music ownership and fair use.
The song I've chosen is Chiddy Bang's All Things Go, which samples Sufjan Stevens' Chicago.
I wouldn't even necessarily call this a sample. It seems to me a sample is a direct rip of a piece of a track for use in a separate song. This uses the same melodic structure and progression, as well as a rip of the chorus' lyrics, but not the song directly. I guess what is and what isn't a sample is a little loose in definition anyway. The interesting thing about this sample is that it takes a beautiful ballad from the prolific alt/indie-folk god Sufjan Stevens and completely re-tools it as a sentimental hip-hop tune, accessing different sensibilities and appeals throughout. It breathed new life into a song I love, and gave me a new window of vision into the hip-hop culture that I know so little about.
This has implications with what Miller's talking about a lot. A huge amount of his literature refers to convergence culture, and the digitality of songs making access greater. The digitality of music enabled this huge genre crossover and the re-appropriation of an indie classic into the world of hip-hop.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Blog #7: a whole lotta things
First de Bourgoing lays out a lot of tenets of contemporary hip-hop culture, especially in LA.
Some of them:
-artists are using the internet to give themselves a unique identity and spread it around
-artists are involving merchandise with their name
-artists are being more active in perpetuating their attitudes
-collaboration is key (really no better way to say it; not trying to directly rip off her article here...)
-hip-hop artists are good story tellers
-women don't get as much credit as they deserve
-hip-hop has a deep oral culture and history surrounding it, and is very dynamic
-a lot of hip-hop artists are using twitter and social networking to spread themselves and thus a lot of hip-hop culture is reflected online.
She ties in technology with a lot of it, the sample-culture of hip-hop and how they use it to give shout-outs to one another.
Second de Bourgoing is really saying that the internet is helping make rappers well-known, and taking advantage of the internet to better achieve the tenets she outlined. It's the subtext behind her entire essay, and it's what we've been talking about thus far. The whole idea of the internet revolutionizing communications- and various cultures taking advantage of that.
Third Miller says quite a lot of things about rhythm science. What I've taken from his book is that rhythm sciences, dj-ing, and writing have a profound impact on our culture and touches briefly on the idea of copying, sampling, borrowing, stealing, the implications of that in hip-hop and culture in general. For example the copyright mentality we have has been around for a very long time- he gave the example of St. Columba in sixth-century Ireland getting flack for copying a manuscript, which is relevant to today.
Lastly I can see the course material moving in the direction of "rights" and information. Who owns what, what about copies? Who owns them, and who has the right to make copies? And sampling- using another's work in a re-organized context with a different impact. Is that copying, what right do they have to re-iterate someone else's information as their own?
Some of them:
-artists are using the internet to give themselves a unique identity and spread it around
-artists are involving merchandise with their name
-artists are being more active in perpetuating their attitudes
-collaboration is key (really no better way to say it; not trying to directly rip off her article here...)
-hip-hop artists are good story tellers
-women don't get as much credit as they deserve
-hip-hop has a deep oral culture and history surrounding it, and is very dynamic
-a lot of hip-hop artists are using twitter and social networking to spread themselves and thus a lot of hip-hop culture is reflected online.
She ties in technology with a lot of it, the sample-culture of hip-hop and how they use it to give shout-outs to one another.
Second de Bourgoing is really saying that the internet is helping make rappers well-known, and taking advantage of the internet to better achieve the tenets she outlined. It's the subtext behind her entire essay, and it's what we've been talking about thus far. The whole idea of the internet revolutionizing communications- and various cultures taking advantage of that.
Third Miller says quite a lot of things about rhythm science. What I've taken from his book is that rhythm sciences, dj-ing, and writing have a profound impact on our culture and touches briefly on the idea of copying, sampling, borrowing, stealing, the implications of that in hip-hop and culture in general. For example the copyright mentality we have has been around for a very long time- he gave the example of St. Columba in sixth-century Ireland getting flack for copying a manuscript, which is relevant to today.
Lastly I can see the course material moving in the direction of "rights" and information. Who owns what, what about copies? Who owns them, and who has the right to make copies? And sampling- using another's work in a re-organized context with a different impact. Is that copying, what right do they have to re-iterate someone else's information as their own?
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Blog #6: Convergence vs. the Third Order
Jenkins' introduction is about the various ways our media is changing. The way we access it, what it means to us, the services we use, and the conglomeration of multiple media are all topics he covers. His take-home point is that businesses need to learn to keep up or face "declining goodwill and diminished revenues."
There are many implications in the digital age for what both Jenkins is talking about. Almost all of the media, services, content that Jenkins refers to can and is digitized. Video, images, text, conversation, and more can be converted into a digital form and let loose into the world of the Third Order of Order. There may be no unifying device, or "black box" that all of the media is centralized through, but there is a central platform that all of it is stored on, a central source that more and more devices are able to access. That platform is the home of the Third Order, the internet. Cell phones, computers, game consoles, and the giant stack of black boxes Jenkins refers to can mostly all interface with the internet. More consistently today the services of yesterday are being hosted online and streamed to the world.
A statement Jenkins makes near the end caught my eye, and it would probably give Weinberger a fit. "There will
be no magical black box that puts everything in order again" (24). If everything is miscellaneous, the idea of a black box should never be to put everything in order. Weinberger might argue that this convergence our culture is experiencing would benefit from being miscellanized, let loose on the internet to be tagged, reordered, and subject to the Third Order. Essentially while companies are trying to keep up with the ways media is converging, they might consider the miscellaneous and not amalgamation into a single black box.
There are many implications in the digital age for what both Jenkins is talking about. Almost all of the media, services, content that Jenkins refers to can and is digitized. Video, images, text, conversation, and more can be converted into a digital form and let loose into the world of the Third Order of Order. There may be no unifying device, or "black box" that all of the media is centralized through, but there is a central platform that all of it is stored on, a central source that more and more devices are able to access. That platform is the home of the Third Order, the internet. Cell phones, computers, game consoles, and the giant stack of black boxes Jenkins refers to can mostly all interface with the internet. More consistently today the services of yesterday are being hosted online and streamed to the world.
A statement Jenkins makes near the end caught my eye, and it would probably give Weinberger a fit. "There will
be no magical black box that puts everything in order again" (24). If everything is miscellaneous, the idea of a black box should never be to put everything in order. Weinberger might argue that this convergence our culture is experiencing would benefit from being miscellanized, let loose on the internet to be tagged, reordered, and subject to the Third Order. Essentially while companies are trying to keep up with the ways media is converging, they might consider the miscellaneous and not amalgamation into a single black box.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Blog #5: using the implicit
What Weinberger is trying to say on page 170 is that there is an intangible, extraordinary amount of implicit meaning that we all depend on and take for granted. For yet another example, knowing what a book is requires you have basic understandings of the publishing system, human activity, information distribution, the act of writing, and a whole bunch of other things that aren't necessarily obvious. How this relates to bits and digital data is that when a humongous volume of digital information is collected, there is a lot of implicit meaning to derive from that data. When humans collectively contribute to something, purposefully or otherwise, a whole lot of data is accumulated. Weinberger's point is essentially that this data can be used by whoever has access to derive implicit meanings and make use of them. The example he provided is that when a store clerk digitized her logbook, she could see a whole lot more implicit meanings that weren't available in the paper form, like certain periods of time where milk and beer sold more often than others. This was possible because the level of control we have over ordering our digital content is greater than physical content. And we can make algorithms that draw on data in different ways to make new meanings. Weinberger's example of that is the idea of a computer finding out where an arts festival is not because it's tagged with the location but because it shares similar metadata with other websites that do contain locational metadata, and it draws implicit meaning from tag associations (such as golden gate bridge with sf and california).
The song I chose was Why Worry by Dire Straits.
The song I chose was Why Worry by Dire Straits.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
February 10th "Tweet"
I didn't want to limit myself to 160 simple characters but I don't want to do a ridiculously critical write-up either when the original assignment was a twitter post anyway. So here are my slightly-less-abridged three-main-points of Weinberger:
- The Web and digital data in general has some serious epistemological considerations for us all
- The physical world is limited; the digital world virtually limitless. He presents a dichotomy throughout about the digital "world" versus the physical world, limitations, possibilities.
- The power of this new connectivity of the third order of order is in our hands. So is the responsibility.
Blog #4: metadata meet web 2something
Weinberger's basically been a big Web 2.0 Propagandist to this point as far as I'm concerned. He's constantly making references to the big-name web-based companies that have been associated with "web 2.0" principles since the buzz-word was first used. Flickr, Delicious, eBay, Google, Amazon, Apple, Wikipedia, he's referencing them with every step he makes, and these are the big online entities that have been tagged (no pun intended) as "Web 2.0" proprietors. His profession that data isn't limited, its duplicity and the relevance to tagging is also talked about, and with the same reverence, in O'Reilly's article. Points that both O'Reilly and Weinberger both discuss include but are not limited to:
In several cases the examples they use are the same: iTunes changing the structure of music, Wikipedia's users making it more valuable than traditional encylopedias, companies using users to make more profit, and Amazon's recommendations exposing new ways to buy things.
Where they differ should also be noted. O'Reilly was discussing the web in relation to itself as they very title suggests. It's not just the web, it's Web 2.0, or its Web squared.. O'Reilly's point was that the Web is improving and changing business and the social world. Weinberger isn't just discussing the web; he's discussing far more epistemological implications about organization, our worldview, and categorization. Weinberger's book is far more comprehensively approaching our society and how it organizes things. He looks not only at the Web and how its getting better or revolutionizing business, but how it is different from the physical world and the way we have organized things before the web existed. This is not a primary consideration of O'Reilly's, who focused mostly on the development of the Web and the development of it for fiscal purposes.
- The complexity of the web and its structure
- How large corporations are revolutionize the way we've done things in the past
- The changing politics of knowledge- how its users are gaining importance and experts are losing ground
- How every individual is responsible for adding value
In several cases the examples they use are the same: iTunes changing the structure of music, Wikipedia's users making it more valuable than traditional encylopedias, companies using users to make more profit, and Amazon's recommendations exposing new ways to buy things.
Where they differ should also be noted. O'Reilly was discussing the web in relation to itself as they very title suggests. It's not just the web, it's Web 2.0, or its Web squared.. O'Reilly's point was that the Web is improving and changing business and the social world. Weinberger isn't just discussing the web; he's discussing far more epistemological implications about organization, our worldview, and categorization. Weinberger's book is far more comprehensively approaching our society and how it organizes things. He looks not only at the Web and how its getting better or revolutionizing business, but how it is different from the physical world and the way we have organized things before the web existed. This is not a primary consideration of O'Reilly's, who focused mostly on the development of the Web and the development of it for fiscal purposes.
Blog #3: Slicing up reality
Well, pertaining to the ways of organize music, that can refer to a number of things. Perhaps this is another blaring example of reality being multi-faceted, but does organization of my music collection mean what arbitrary buzz-word categories (read: Genres) all my music fits into, or how I personally arrange and mark it for listening? I guess there are some pluralities between the two distinctions that apply to both. Like Weinberger said, we try to split things all the time. For example the terrible loaded question: "what kind of music do you listen to?" That question is essentially saying "what label can I apply to your entire musical identity?" Or Weinberger might rephrase it as "what branches is your music on?" Anyway, I'll try and discuss both here.
I generally dislike the idea of genres when it comes to music. Genres are great for movies; there's usually some kind of consensus on them: comedies seek to entertain through humor, romances focus on relationships, there's not a lot of confusing, arbitrary terminology. However when people craft such terms as "post-punk with w-bit influences" I get really confused. What is punk? What does it mean to be post-punk? What does 8-bit have to do with anything? It gets worse the more you add: post-black melodic grndcore egyptian speed death metal. I guess I don't understand why the use of arbitrary words when you can just throw down a couple adjectives and call it good? I don't see the need to say that an album is "alt-folk contemporary indie rock" when I can say that it combines modern sensibilities of recording with laid-back acoustic melodies, upbeat singing, and some orchestral integration. And then there's the issue of artists that mix it up with a whole host of influences and do a different thing with each song or even within songs. This genre-based thinking is too compartmentalized for me; I just feel more free without deciding that I need to neatly file all 3000 songs I listen to into nicely labeled boxes.
For a little more prompt-relevance: I guess I've met a lot of people who like to organize their music this way. They do it so much that they even like to put it into the song's metadata. They use genres to arrange and listen to their music, because they have enough of it that's so incredibly similar that it fits into those boxes and they listen for the telltale signs of certain genres in their music for the sake of compartmentalizing it in that way. Whereas I just have it divided by artist, album, year, and track wherever I can to create groupings; they'll add the additional trait of genre and do that.
The other aspect of organizational is the more direct aspect of how exactly I have it stored on my hard drive and how exactly I access it. I have an XML spreadsheet of my library that stores info about where all my songs are and tags their metadata. I use a central program to read this spreadsheet and arrange my tracks based off of the metadata. When I click play, it uses the XML spreadsheet to locate the file and then plays it. I like this method but unfortunately unless I preserve the XML spreadsheet (which I've never had the foresight to do), little, it any of the metadata is stored in songs themselves so I lose most of it with each format or machine switch. One day I'll probably switch from iTunes to Foobar and just use a format that can store metadata.
I generally dislike the idea of genres when it comes to music. Genres are great for movies; there's usually some kind of consensus on them: comedies seek to entertain through humor, romances focus on relationships, there's not a lot of confusing, arbitrary terminology. However when people craft such terms as "post-punk with w-bit influences" I get really confused. What is punk? What does it mean to be post-punk? What does 8-bit have to do with anything? It gets worse the more you add: post-black melodic grndcore egyptian speed death metal. I guess I don't understand why the use of arbitrary words when you can just throw down a couple adjectives and call it good? I don't see the need to say that an album is "alt-folk contemporary indie rock" when I can say that it combines modern sensibilities of recording with laid-back acoustic melodies, upbeat singing, and some orchestral integration. And then there's the issue of artists that mix it up with a whole host of influences and do a different thing with each song or even within songs. This genre-based thinking is too compartmentalized for me; I just feel more free without deciding that I need to neatly file all 3000 songs I listen to into nicely labeled boxes.
For a little more prompt-relevance: I guess I've met a lot of people who like to organize their music this way. They do it so much that they even like to put it into the song's metadata. They use genres to arrange and listen to their music, because they have enough of it that's so incredibly similar that it fits into those boxes and they listen for the telltale signs of certain genres in their music for the sake of compartmentalizing it in that way. Whereas I just have it divided by artist, album, year, and track wherever I can to create groupings; they'll add the additional trait of genre and do that.
The other aspect of organizational is the more direct aspect of how exactly I have it stored on my hard drive and how exactly I access it. I have an XML spreadsheet of my library that stores info about where all my songs are and tags their metadata. I use a central program to read this spreadsheet and arrange my tracks based off of the metadata. When I click play, it uses the XML spreadsheet to locate the file and then plays it. I like this method but unfortunately unless I preserve the XML spreadsheet (which I've never had the foresight to do), little, it any of the metadata is stored in songs themselves so I lose most of it with each format or machine switch. One day I'll probably switch from iTunes to Foobar and just use a format that can store metadata.
Blog #2: Chapters 1 and 2
To me, the main point Weinberger is trying to make is that we have exited the realm of the physical, the paper medium. Atoms are limited; digital organization is better in every way. "We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory" (22) is sort of the thesis of the first chapter in that it revels in the miscellany of the new digital order. It praises the digital and how being miscellaneous is better than the limited structures of organization we used previously. Digitized access to things makes for a far more wholesome experience when it comes to the hunt for information. The third order of order removes the barriers we've seen previously.
One thing that I've personally pulled lots of hairs out over keeping organized is my music library. I've labored away so many tedious hours of my life making sure I have incredible, instant, and very "third-order" access to my own musical collection. Interestingly enough, while the physical medium may have been almost completely phased out by the "beauty" of the digital that Weinberger is so quick to put on a pedestal, it has so many issues. The biggest qualm I've had with the replacement of physical data with digital data is that the platform we access and centralize our digital data with, the computer, is very unstable. Far, far too many times has some virus, upgrade, server failure, or other issue with the inherent fragility of computers caused me to lose access to my entire collection of music. Viruses rendering my system unstable cause me to format my hard drive, bam there goes my music. Getting a new laptop for my birthday causes the issue of having to transfer 17 GB of data, re-organize and re-sync it with an entirely new machine. The unfortunate reality of iTunes is that it tends to format files so that they don't take their metadata with them from place to place unless you continue to use iTunes, etc. etc. I could discuss the merits of various music players at length but that's irrelevant; I've unfortunately coordinated my entire music library around the familiar iTunes platform and that makes it a gigantic pain to move digital data from machine to machine, hard drive wipe to hard drive wipe. Especially when the alternative is to re-rip over 100 different CDs and deal with tagging metadata on all of it. It's quite a pain.
Thus the physical realm, with its limitations, has its advantages. Though Weinberger argues up a good storm for bits vs. atoms, I'm likened to the discussions in my DTC 375 class of the advent of the camera and how there was quite a movement around it. The idea was floating around that it was this new way to capture reality far better than paintings or art ever could and that art was thus invalidated; but it remains. As do our physical libraries and CD collections. Data is not the king, even in all the glory of the "unfulfilled glory" of the miscellaneous.
One thing that I've personally pulled lots of hairs out over keeping organized is my music library. I've labored away so many tedious hours of my life making sure I have incredible, instant, and very "third-order" access to my own musical collection. Interestingly enough, while the physical medium may have been almost completely phased out by the "beauty" of the digital that Weinberger is so quick to put on a pedestal, it has so many issues. The biggest qualm I've had with the replacement of physical data with digital data is that the platform we access and centralize our digital data with, the computer, is very unstable. Far, far too many times has some virus, upgrade, server failure, or other issue with the inherent fragility of computers caused me to lose access to my entire collection of music. Viruses rendering my system unstable cause me to format my hard drive, bam there goes my music. Getting a new laptop for my birthday causes the issue of having to transfer 17 GB of data, re-organize and re-sync it with an entirely new machine. The unfortunate reality of iTunes is that it tends to format files so that they don't take their metadata with them from place to place unless you continue to use iTunes, etc. etc. I could discuss the merits of various music players at length but that's irrelevant; I've unfortunately coordinated my entire music library around the familiar iTunes platform and that makes it a gigantic pain to move digital data from machine to machine, hard drive wipe to hard drive wipe. Especially when the alternative is to re-rip over 100 different CDs and deal with tagging metadata on all of it. It's quite a pain.
Thus the physical realm, with its limitations, has its advantages. Though Weinberger argues up a good storm for bits vs. atoms, I'm likened to the discussions in my DTC 375 class of the advent of the camera and how there was quite a movement around it. The idea was floating around that it was this new way to capture reality far better than paintings or art ever could and that art was thus invalidated; but it remains. As do our physical libraries and CD collections. Data is not the king, even in all the glory of the "unfulfilled glory" of the miscellaneous.
Sorry it's late!
I understand the repercussions but my Weinberger book just came in on thursday and by this point I've only got half of it read. I hope to finish it this weekend; the accompanying blog posts will shortly follow!
Monday, January 24, 2011
Blog #1
With Web 2.0 swiftly becoming a tired-out buzz word that really only offers a bunch of basic tenets of our generation's expectations of the web, there are more and more ways for money to be made online. Being intensely interested in graphic design (hence me being in the DTC program at WSU), I take from this article a number of things.
Regarding the Web as a platform, I wonder if one day perhaps there will be a premium industry-standard way of designing imagery that's available on the web as opposed to programs that are run off of a hard drive. It seems implausible, unlikely, and unusual, but that's what Web squared is all about- defying convention and really pushing the envelope with what services are available online. We're already seeing mass-distributed ways to teach and profess the finer arts and nuances of using the current standard creative programs, all available as video streams online. It's making the self-taught freelance graphic artist much more likely to succeed. A big social movement to develop an open-source, web-based design program would be a dream come true for the strapped-for-cash design wannabe like myself. Gimp is a great alternative, but far from the industry standard that is Photoshop, and not web-based.
Unfortunately the web probably isn't a good medium for design, unless applications somehow gain a level of fidelity that we're not familiar with from the internet. It's a pipe-dream I suppose.
The coolest web application I've seen lately is Prezi. I bet microsoft has lost a lot of business from Powerpoint because of it. In retrospect, Powerpoint has always been great but I can't see why it's taken this long for a web-based, free application to take its place.
Regarding the Web as a platform, I wonder if one day perhaps there will be a premium industry-standard way of designing imagery that's available on the web as opposed to programs that are run off of a hard drive. It seems implausible, unlikely, and unusual, but that's what Web squared is all about- defying convention and really pushing the envelope with what services are available online. We're already seeing mass-distributed ways to teach and profess the finer arts and nuances of using the current standard creative programs, all available as video streams online. It's making the self-taught freelance graphic artist much more likely to succeed. A big social movement to develop an open-source, web-based design program would be a dream come true for the strapped-for-cash design wannabe like myself. Gimp is a great alternative, but far from the industry standard that is Photoshop, and not web-based.
Unfortunately the web probably isn't a good medium for design, unless applications somehow gain a level of fidelity that we're not familiar with from the internet. It's a pipe-dream I suppose.
The coolest web application I've seen lately is Prezi. I bet microsoft has lost a lot of business from Powerpoint because of it. In retrospect, Powerpoint has always been great but I can't see why it's taken this long for a web-based, free application to take its place.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
DTC 356
From here on out, all posts on this web site will be pertaining directly to dtc356 required postings. All posts on this website previously pertained directly to DTC 375 required postings.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Final Paper Proposal
My proposed thesis for this paper is that any plot or story-driven video game is essentially a form of remediated film. My goal is to deeply analyze the relationship between films and video games and how they've worked off of each other.
My outline is as follows:
Introduction broadly connects how we consume and digest media; what we seek out of it, what we get, how we get it, and show how these things might obviously tie film and video games together. Ultimately talk about the connection between film and video games, especially concerning their narrative.
aybe an extended introduction or the first part of the body might involve a more intense looking at remediation and really reifywhat it means for something to be remediated. Or compare/contrast it with evolution. This could possibly be saved as the last part of the body, and should be brief because it's not the main point behind the paper.
In the body video games would need discussing in detail. Not necessarily games themselves, but sort of the mechanics of the storytelling, the narrative they use, the messages they can convey, theatrics in games, and the relationship films and games have.
Ultimately I would try and show how video games have borrowed a lot of production values in film, and how they convey a plot, and through their own production values they can be especially theatrical But as in remediation, they are more and different than film in that they engross the player on a more intimate level. The control of a character(s) can provide an intimate relationship with the plot unlike films, and of course interactivity is a very different medium all around.
Works Cited
Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Print.
This class reading is the defining work on what exactly remediation is, and will prove crucial to understanding the difference between remediation and evolution, and is necessary to differentiate what video games do versus what films do.
Galloway, Alexander R. "Social Realism in Gaming." Game Studies 4.1 (2004). Web. 2 Dec. 2010.
This article discusses the realism developers strive for in many games of this and last generation. Though he refers not only to poly counts and anti-aliasing, he discusses the tendency to make cultures, locations, and peoples represented in games as accurately as possible. This is vital to the idea of video games and films being close relatives.
Hanson, Matt. "Film Futures in the Digital Age." The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age, by Matt Hanson. RotoVision. Web. 03 Dec. 2010. <http://www.endofcelluloid.com/>.
This is the website of the book by Matt Hanson that allegedly challenges and redefines film. It mentions video games several times in relation to film, and discusses the relationship between the two; what I seek to do as well in my paper.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Beyond Myth and Metaphor." Game Studies 1.1 (2001). Web. 2 Dec. 2010.
Marie-Laure Ryan describes narrative in detail, specifically its function in digital media. As the majority of this paper will be analyzing just that, this article is perfect.
Sisler, Vit. "Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games." Digital Islam. Web. 2 Dec. 2010. <http://www.digitalislam.eu/article.do?articleId=1704>.
This article discusses representation, the construction of meaning through words or symbols. It's mainly a cultural studies article about how American and European games portray Arabs, but underneath that meaning is a secondary subtext that describes the power of video games to represent and convey meaning through narrative, a powerful tool for this paper.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Revisiting Remediation
Video games have been a pretty big portion of my life since I was little. I really loved escaping into a world surreal and unlike mine own. Having vested a large amount of money and time into them, I have come to know a whole lot about them and their implications in society. I find them to be a form of art not unlike other texts, books, novels, paintings, or films. Personally, I feel that the element of interactivity makes many video games far more engaging and powerful than films. Obviously various media have their advantages, but for our final paper I would like to argue that certain styles of video games can be remediation of film.
This is such a big step to take, and thus I think appropriate to tackle in a final paper. Remediation and Evolution have a close relationship but both are fundamental on the same idea- something has been developed from, or in direct opposition to a current idea and attemps to expand on it or better it. Saying that video games are related to film and improve or differ from them in certain ways inherently ties them to film. I believe this to be a very rich topic with a lot of possibility for expansion, discussion, and argument to be made. To unfortunately expose a lot of my rather embarrassing childhood, I have been discussing video games with a whole plethora of people in person and on the internet since at least 2003 and have seen a whole range of arguments made. In my memory I've never quite seen a fully-composed argumentative thesis comparing film and video games, their development, relationship, and how video games are essentially a remediated form of film. For this reason I think the topic can be unique, deep, full of different angles to explore, and intriguing.
This is such a big step to take, and thus I think appropriate to tackle in a final paper. Remediation and Evolution have a close relationship but both are fundamental on the same idea- something has been developed from, or in direct opposition to a current idea and attemps to expand on it or better it. Saying that video games are related to film and improve or differ from them in certain ways inherently ties them to film. I believe this to be a very rich topic with a lot of possibility for expansion, discussion, and argument to be made. To unfortunately expose a lot of my rather embarrassing childhood, I have been discussing video games with a whole plethora of people in person and on the internet since at least 2003 and have seen a whole range of arguments made. In my memory I've never quite seen a fully-composed argumentative thesis comparing film and video games, their development, relationship, and how video games are essentially a remediated form of film. For this reason I think the topic can be unique, deep, full of different angles to explore, and intriguing.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Communications redefined
One major aspect of Darnton's Communication Circuit that has been redefined today is the interaction between booksellers and readers. In our age of instant gratification, immediacy, access, and digitization, we've developed new ways of purchasing and reading books, especially since the advent of the world wide web.
No more are we restricted to getting books from bookstores, libraries, second hand stores, or local book exchanges. With web sites on the internet and internet-capable personal devices, we can acquire whole books without leaving our homes. Previously, books were sold at the traditional "brick and mortar" locations, where the buyer's presence was required for the transaction to take place. Often times, according to Adams and Barker, books weren't even bound and that was the duty of a third-party entity.
The difference in today's first-world society, especially since the advent of the world wide web and electronic banking transfers, we can transfer funds over the internet and purchase a copy of a book from the convenient location of… anywhere that has internet access. The social and official infrastructures our society has put in place allow for an expedited service to deliver the book to the purchaser with almost no effort whatsoever on their part. Giant corporations like Amazon, Half.com, Hastings, and Barnes and Noble all allow books to be purchased electronically over the internet and subsequently shipped to whomever.
Another, even more modern evolution of the communication between booksellers and readers is the recent take-off of electronic "readers." These are small handheld devices that use advanced vector technology to display text on small screens that very closely imitate the look of paper. Internet-capable, they also allow readers to purchase books from almost any location, but have the advantage of receiving a digital copy of their book of choice, allowing them to read the content immediately. This offers tertiary benefits as well, namely being able to browse large selections and storing multiple books on the same small device but these are very much unimportant and irrelevant to the communications circuit and are largely hyperbole. The e-books or e-readers don't offer the advantage of aesthetic appeal, unfortunately, as Adams and Barker elaborate on. They talk about many figures throughout history who used books to display certain things about themselves, because of the books' beauty or subject material. All of that information being lost in digital copies stored on a magnetic platter, the content and messages any book has to convey can still be done digitally. This still allows for the same reception and survival aspects of the newly proposed model Adams and Barker come up with, and arguably these digital copies will have greater impacts and survival because if the aesthetic and lustrous appeal of the books are lost then more likely their purchaser will have more intent to actually peruse their content than the purchaser of a standard physical book.
Ultimately the electronic purchasing system coupled with digital distribution and worldwide shipping allows books to be purchased far easier and by far more people than the previous system of actually traveling to a bookstore, peddler, or pirate. This aspect of the communications circuit, while still structurally the same, has been redefined since before the advent of the internet and electronic book distribution.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Children; Our Future
As Crain argues in her chapter "The Republic of ABC: Alphabetizing Americans," the way we're taught discipline, literacy, discourse, and structure shapes the way we think and how we perceive culture. One of Crain's example is a common word-association alphabet in the eighteenth century that associated things with the letters of the alphabet, and because noblemen, kings, beggars, soldiers, etc., were some of the things associated with letters, it instilled a sense of class and hierarchy in the children who were exposed to these media.
I'm going to use the same example- how the alphabet and certain word-letter associations would associate very different cultural meanings on our chlidren.
If we lived in a socialist community, where the community was the highest valued idea, the alphabet taught to children would look very different. A would stand for Alarm, the thing that makes every good worker get out of bed on time to go to work. B would stand for the Bricklayer, who makes all of our buildings, C would stand for Coal that keeps the great furnaces of the nation burning, so on and so forth.
As Crain argues, this works two ways. Children are acculturated by these learning devices, and then as they age and become part of the system they shape the culture. So a Marxist/Socialist style country that produces this media would possibly raise children with a predisposition towards those ideas, children who are permanently acculturated in a society where community is center of all government. These children would then go on to promote the society even more. It's not just the society imparting its ways onto its children, these children eventually grow into the society and shape it.
Likewise, in the society that would teach children through catechisms children would be far more predisposed towards faith, the bible, and Christianity. A might stand for Adam, B for Bible, C for Christ, D for Deuteronomy, E for Eve, F for forgiveness...
These cultural mnemonics mean significant things down the road. When an entire society of people was raised on "A for Adam," at some point in their lives they have to remember the letter A as the signifier for any reason, the signified "Adam" automatically comes to mind, which instantly generates the Bible, Christianity, and all of the implications of that in their mind. Likewise, a society that thinks "A for Alarm" would think of the signified "Alarm" every time they had to use the alphabet, and would thus be reminded of getting up to go to work like a good citizen. Having these cultural leanings in one's mind can affect the construction of someone's entire being within their culture, as is the basic premise of Crain's argument.
I'm going to use the same example- how the alphabet and certain word-letter associations would associate very different cultural meanings on our chlidren.
If we lived in a socialist community, where the community was the highest valued idea, the alphabet taught to children would look very different. A would stand for Alarm, the thing that makes every good worker get out of bed on time to go to work. B would stand for the Bricklayer, who makes all of our buildings, C would stand for Coal that keeps the great furnaces of the nation burning, so on and so forth.
As Crain argues, this works two ways. Children are acculturated by these learning devices, and then as they age and become part of the system they shape the culture. So a Marxist/Socialist style country that produces this media would possibly raise children with a predisposition towards those ideas, children who are permanently acculturated in a society where community is center of all government. These children would then go on to promote the society even more. It's not just the society imparting its ways onto its children, these children eventually grow into the society and shape it.
Likewise, in the society that would teach children through catechisms children would be far more predisposed towards faith, the bible, and Christianity. A might stand for Adam, B for Bible, C for Christ, D for Deuteronomy, E for Eve, F for forgiveness...
These cultural mnemonics mean significant things down the road. When an entire society of people was raised on "A for Adam," at some point in their lives they have to remember the letter A as the signifier for any reason, the signified "Adam" automatically comes to mind, which instantly generates the Bible, Christianity, and all of the implications of that in their mind. Likewise, a society that thinks "A for Alarm" would think of the signified "Alarm" every time they had to use the alphabet, and would thus be reminded of getting up to go to work like a good citizen. Having these cultural leanings in one's mind can affect the construction of someone's entire being within their culture, as is the basic premise of Crain's argument.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Internet Authorship Scrutiny
I hope by now this particular case hasn't been done to death, but I couldn't get my mind off of the vast expanse that is the internet when I was reading Adrian Johns' book.
His entire thesis is that our notions of veracity in print is not inherent- printed texts aren't reliable, authoritative, and their content isn't true by virtue of the fact that they are printed texts. The accuracy of the information in print is only possible with lots of effort and construction put into the system to make it so- and it's made so that we can easily digest it without any acknowledging of the work that goes on behind the scenes of printed materials.
His evidence is that throughout the early modern period when print was in its beginnings, textual media wasn't as solid and fixed as it is now. The Manuscripts article too discussed the mechanics of copying and how copies of texts were made in the early modern period. Johns' article discussed in detail that one could never really rely on text as some unfaltering source of true information, that if a reader picked up a book "he or she could not be immediately certain that it was what it claimed to be." He then discusses Tycho Brahe and how his distributed works differed from place to place depending on where they were made and the circumstances they were acquired in. It really challenges the idea that print culture promotes the basis of gaining knowledge, that "durable paper entities" are the foundation of learning.
That being said, we are experiencing the same thing all over again in this era regarding the dissemination of knowledge over the internet. As Johns argued, there weren't always the legislation, practices, and systems in place to guarantee the accuracy and authority of all printed media that we take for granted, and as I argue, there aren't totally solid and reliable systems in place to censor all of the information online, at least not nearly as well-established ones as we have for print today. The internet is a mess, simply put. With such a ridiculously large host of information out there planted by almost anybody and everybody worldwide, there's no control over who can post, when, where, and what. The systems we have established to authorize content online only really work for a small portion of the content. Things like Creative Commons and Copyright laws help make sure that some authors are credited for their work, along with other systems. But at the point the internet is at now, it's impossible to guarantee that information or media discovered online is accurate and true. Only after much scrutiny and research can we guarantee anything- very much like the world Johns discussed in the early modern era. There are definitely parallels with what he was saying about printed texts back then and texts online today.
I also couldn't help but notice how this tied in with something Ong said in work of his we had to read a few weeks ago- something about how oral accounts had much higher gravity and veracity than printed accounts back when print was just getting started, and nobody gave written accounts as much significance and weight as they do today.
His entire thesis is that our notions of veracity in print is not inherent- printed texts aren't reliable, authoritative, and their content isn't true by virtue of the fact that they are printed texts. The accuracy of the information in print is only possible with lots of effort and construction put into the system to make it so- and it's made so that we can easily digest it without any acknowledging of the work that goes on behind the scenes of printed materials.
His evidence is that throughout the early modern period when print was in its beginnings, textual media wasn't as solid and fixed as it is now. The Manuscripts article too discussed the mechanics of copying and how copies of texts were made in the early modern period. Johns' article discussed in detail that one could never really rely on text as some unfaltering source of true information, that if a reader picked up a book "he or she could not be immediately certain that it was what it claimed to be." He then discusses Tycho Brahe and how his distributed works differed from place to place depending on where they were made and the circumstances they were acquired in. It really challenges the idea that print culture promotes the basis of gaining knowledge, that "durable paper entities" are the foundation of learning.
That being said, we are experiencing the same thing all over again in this era regarding the dissemination of knowledge over the internet. As Johns argued, there weren't always the legislation, practices, and systems in place to guarantee the accuracy and authority of all printed media that we take for granted, and as I argue, there aren't totally solid and reliable systems in place to censor all of the information online, at least not nearly as well-established ones as we have for print today. The internet is a mess, simply put. With such a ridiculously large host of information out there planted by almost anybody and everybody worldwide, there's no control over who can post, when, where, and what. The systems we have established to authorize content online only really work for a small portion of the content. Things like Creative Commons and Copyright laws help make sure that some authors are credited for their work, along with other systems. But at the point the internet is at now, it's impossible to guarantee that information or media discovered online is accurate and true. Only after much scrutiny and research can we guarantee anything- very much like the world Johns discussed in the early modern era. There are definitely parallels with what he was saying about printed texts back then and texts online today.
I also couldn't help but notice how this tied in with something Ong said in work of his we had to read a few weeks ago- something about how oral accounts had much higher gravity and veracity than printed accounts back when print was just getting started, and nobody gave written accounts as much significance and weight as they do today.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Free Form Poetry's .... Form
In the Drucker and McGann article, a take-home point of theirs' was that "The presentational form of texts and images usually masques their logical operations in a surface rhetoric that dominates and controls our conscious attention." I take this to mean that when we read a text- say a book, article, etc., the way our writing-conscious brains work is that we try our best to absorb the content or message the author is getting at. In this process we almost completely ignore the form, composition, arrangement, and graphical nature of the text. I don't believe this to be entirely true, at least in the all-inclusive sense. Yes, generally, when reading a book or paper or article we will absorb the information and throw the concept of form away. However, we use several elements that are included in the graphical nature, or the logical arrangement of text to enhance some elements. Some minor examples- manicules, engorged first letters, color, certain typefaces, the ability to turn on "invisibles" in Office Word programs, and skewed lettering. All of these are examples of the "logical operations in a surface rhetoric" that actually aren't masked by their presentational form, and we very much use it to enhance their noticeability, even.
My primary example and the subject of this entry is free form poetry. The very title itself refutes the idea that we abandon form in texts. Free Form Poetry is the antithesis to that notion. The form of free-form poetry, while not always contrary to the normal form of written language, definitely differs from the ordinary line-after-line of normal text we see. Its presentational form opens up the way we see it, and not only doesn't mask its logical operation but enhances it. For example, the use of space in free form poetry could (not always) completely change the way we read something and give it new meaning- part of its logical operation. Normally, we just take the idea of space for granted as that little invisible (not always so if you have an Office Word Program!) divider between words that does nothing but prevent our beautiful text from being an alphabetic jumble. When you incorporate
BIG
spaces between your words it emphasizes them and thus draws attention to the form of the text.
My primary example and the subject of this entry is free form poetry. The very title itself refutes the idea that we abandon form in texts. Free Form Poetry is the antithesis to that notion. The form of free-form poetry, while not always contrary to the normal form of written language, definitely differs from the ordinary line-after-line of normal text we see. Its presentational form opens up the way we see it, and not only doesn't mask its logical operation but enhances it. For example, the use of space in free form poetry could (not always) completely change the way we read something and give it new meaning- part of its logical operation. Normally, we just take the idea of space for granted as that little invisible (not always so if you have an Office Word Program!) divider between words that does nothing but prevent our beautiful text from being an alphabetic jumble. When you incorporate
BIG
spaces between your words it emphasizes them and thus draws attention to the form of the text.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Conscious Assessment of Print
Tim Carmody describes the Print Revolution in his article "10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books." He discusses how print changed the way we interact with a text fundamentally, and I think this is very true.
Walter Ong claims in chapter 3 of his book "Orality and Literacy" that writing restructures consciousness. This is very relevant to the print revolution of the Renaissance that Carmody was talking about- print changed the way we consciously experience a text.
Oral speech, as Ong discusses in the chapter, is a social act that takes place in a specific location at a specific time, and is challengeable. For the longest time people, even those exposed to writing, would hold oral communication much more reliable than written word. When interacting with print, everybody interacts with an exact copy of the same print, so a print that was distributed could reach many individuals and offer a sense of community- after all somebody else somewhere was experiencing this same exact text. Further more, like all writing, it's experienced away from its creator and at a different date, so there is that disconnectedness. So instead of interacting with a person, they're interacting more directly with the text itself. The author is writing it for a large audience and therefore has to cater it to the people. "The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves..." (Ong 100). That is where the community aspect is built, several, perhaps hundreds or thousands of people reading, interacting with the same text. Also, as Carmody argues, this helped to change readers' expectations of texts in the future.
Walter Ong claims in chapter 3 of his book "Orality and Literacy" that writing restructures consciousness. This is very relevant to the print revolution of the Renaissance that Carmody was talking about- print changed the way we consciously experience a text.
Oral speech, as Ong discusses in the chapter, is a social act that takes place in a specific location at a specific time, and is challengeable. For the longest time people, even those exposed to writing, would hold oral communication much more reliable than written word. When interacting with print, everybody interacts with an exact copy of the same print, so a print that was distributed could reach many individuals and offer a sense of community- after all somebody else somewhere was experiencing this same exact text. Further more, like all writing, it's experienced away from its creator and at a different date, so there is that disconnectedness. So instead of interacting with a person, they're interacting more directly with the text itself. The author is writing it for a large audience and therefore has to cater it to the people. "The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves..." (Ong 100). That is where the community aspect is built, several, perhaps hundreds or thousands of people reading, interacting with the same text. Also, as Carmody argues, this helped to change readers' expectations of texts in the future.
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